Soon, we could notice a departure from the normal behavior by Google. The search giant is mulling about ranking search results based on facts and not links. To be precise, the search engine is exploring ways that could effectively evaluate truth about web pages being read.
Google’s New Technology
Google has proposed a way to rank search results based not on popularity of Web pages, but by their factual accuracy. The company’s hotly debated and much-studied ranking algorithm is likely to include accuracy among the factors it uses to choose the search results.
The news came into light after researchers at Google posted a paper last month on the site arXiv.org, an online archive of scientific research. It suggested that Google was working on changing the way it ranks its search results.
Later, it was learned a team of Google researchers has devised a new way to rank pages, called Knowledge-Based Trust score. The system’s not live but is likely to be in the near future. What it essentially does is provide results by counting the number of incorrect facts within a page.
Now, the million dollar question that pops up is HOW?? Well, it does that by looking up content and comparing it to Google’s Knowledge Vault.
Google’s Knowledge Vault is a store of facts that have been pulled off of the Internet. It appears to be a sort of a pool of facts that are broadly agreed on online, judged by the researchers to count as proxy for truth. Naturally, if web pages whose truth value you want to evaluate contains information that contradicts the Vault, they slip to the bottom in the ranking.
Although, the whole process is in early stage of development, researchers believe the concept holds “promise” and shows “improvement.”