> "Is abortion right", returns from a strongly pro-choice viewpoint<p><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=is+abortion+right" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...</a><p>> "Is abortion okay", returns an excerpt from a strongly pro-life viewpoint<p><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=is+abortion+okay" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...</a><p>> "Does God exist", returns an atheist's viewpoint<p><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=does+god+exist" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...</a><p>> "Is God real", returns a strongly theistic viewpoint<p><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=is+god+real" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...</a><p>I feel like Google isn't doing a good service by providing quick and very biased answers to very big questions.
Xin Luna Dong at Google works on the problem of web site factual credibility. See her talk at Stanford.[1] There's a database of well-known facts, and when web sites mention those subjects, their credibility is rated by detecting disagreements with those facts. This in turn affects their search ranking. This helps detect satire sites, fantasy baseball vs real baseball, Obama "birthers", and such. She said the system is live for some topics, but not fully rolled out yet.<p>[1] <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/150429.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/150429.html</a>
I long for an age where pre-medieval superstition are expunged from popular culture. It's truly embarassing to see a large percentage of humanity still in the grip of ideas promoted by decrepit old men wearing funny hats.<p>Men who have contributed absolulely nothing to the advancement of society, culture, science, medicine, engineering or any of the real things that improve the human condition.<p>These people truly need to be laughed at and ridiculed. From the Pope all the way down the hierarchy and similarly for all religions.<p>Think about what these people do and contribute every day versus what teachers, scientists, doctors, engineers, construction workers and business people contribute. There is zero comparison.<p>It's 2015. Ridicule them. Don't apease or respect them. And please, oh, please, do not give them the respect of having equal standing to scientific theories on the internet. A search for anything creationist should only deliver solid explanations of how utterly ridiculous it is to even begin to consider any part of the entire contrived framework.<p>How much longer are we going to tolerate the men with funny hats piss all over centuries of accumulated and massively tested scientific knowledge? 100 years? 200? 500? Why?
I'd really rather prefer there was some online repository of facts, constantly updated via Machine Learning over publicly available information, which might give up to the second responses of the kind 'Our current understanding is ...'<p>Is there one already? Wolfram Alpha is close, I guess. Wikipedia is not quite what I'm thinking of. Google is working on something, not sure if it's public though. Their search engine.. also not quite what I'm thinking of.<p>What/where have I missed?
Reminds me of one of my favorite @profbriancox tweets:<p>"Wading thru much bollocks trying to research evolution of pigments. I suggest Google introduce a logical "and.not.god_did_it" switch"<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/115080841411051520" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/115080841411051520</a>
There's a very interesting and subtle shift of the perception of what truth and facts are in the last ten-fifteen years. A friend once said to me, years ago, "Google is my memory".<p>I'm not even remotely qualified to untangle the issues, but fundamentally it seems the problem is that truth is being mediated by the electronic systems "I feel lucky" rather than critically analyzed. It's similar to the old newspaper mediation of truth, but far more widespread.
Real time updates now make Google bombs even easier to accomplish. The result described in the article is #2 on the page, after a one day old article describing the problem. This article is in the "In The News" section.