Google Plans to Tell Us What's True

Launched in 1997 the google search engine has become the most widely used search engine in the world. Approximately 65% of all searches made come from the internet giant. Initially, as a search engine, Google, only displayed results that lead to webpages. These results are based on the amount of links to a website. The more links to it the more popular it was believed to be and the higher it was placed in Google’s queue. The search engine then began evolving. It started adding built in functions to improve the user experience. These tools include a translator, dictionary, calculator, unit converter, and others. While these built in tools are convenient and helpful; it is clear that Google was moving away from just being a search engine.   

Then something happened behind the scenes, search algorithms specific to every individual. Google’s search engine tailors a person’s results based on their preferences if they are signed in to their Gmail or google account. However even if they aren’t, Google still uses 57 signals from your connection such as your location, the browser you’re using, and the computer being used to tailor your results. AS Pariser said in his Ted Talk about filter bubbles, the internet is now deciding what it thinks we should see. Well these search algorithms just rearranged the top results into links that mirrored our interests or views. Now, google is trying to come up with a new way to control what appears on the first page.

     Google is currently working on a fact checking system that will check the mount of truthfulness on a site and rank it based on that. This system would tap into Google’s Knowledge Vault of all facts that Google has collected from the internet. According to Google, all these facts have been unanimously verified and are to be considered truth. The new system will compare all the information on the site against what is in the Vault and any site with few contradictions would be considered trust worthy. Google will be assigning a Knowledge-Based Trust score to each site based on how truthful the site is deemed to be. Google reports that initial testing on a small set of sites has proven the algorithm effective.

  So let’s look to the future. One in which, google not only chooses what it thinks we should see but it also tells us how true a site is. If used only on empirical data or on facts that can’t be disputed then this new model could be very effective. It would help lower the number of people getting mislead by false information and make fact checking a much smaller process, if anyone would still do it. However, I feel that a generation that is introduced to Google with this built in knowledge base would easily fall prey to it. Blindly trusting Google’s truthfulness rating could lead to getting wrong information, or at least the inability to double check the information. It might start as a very accommodating tool but who knows where it will lead. No one saw the search algorithms being inserted into Google’s core, and now they tell us what we should see. What if Google sees you’re a smoker advertises for NicoDerm (nicotine patches), could they not easily pass you studies that say electronic cigarettes are the worse alternative to nicotine patches?  Couldn’t Google easily raise the truthfulness of a site or article if they had a sponsor that would pay them lots of money for it? As we are becoming more and more reliant on technology we should keep in mind who should be in control.   

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VPXTmfnF_4I