Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

Some facts are easy, like &quot;capital of albania&quot; or &quot;population of shenzhen&quot; or &quot;age of clint eastwood&quot;.<p>But is consensus the right answer for more interesting facts? Does the consensus give the right answer for &quot;minimum wage effect on economy&quot; or &quot;do firearms make us safer&quot; or &quot;crime rate of immigrants&quot;?<p>Will Google localize their facts? For a question like &quot;us supporting nazis in ukraine&quot;, will Russian residents get one answer while US residents get a different answer?<p>The old Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia had different facts for different countries. In the US edition, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, while the British version said it was Sir Joseph Swan.<p>As Bill Gates famously wrote[1], &quot;The facts depend on where you are coming from&quot;.<p>Google Maps used to show different national borders depending on where the user was located[2], maybe it still does. Chinese users saw Arunachal Pradesh as part of China, while Indian users saw it as part of India.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120629032909/http://www.btimes.co.za/97/0406/tech/tech6.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120629032909&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.btimes...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-depending-on-where-you-view-them/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;224821&#x2F;see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-d...</a>

Ha. SEO is about to get a lot easier. SEO is search engine optimization. Easy is an adjective and is the opposite of hard. &quot;Ha&quot; is an expression of laughter.

What is &quot;fact&quot; is actually highly subjective and puts Google in the place of picking the &quot;winners&quot; for arguments or perhaps pushing their own political and religious agenda.<p>Fact: Vaccines are Dangerous Fact: Vaccines are Safe and prevent spread of deadly diseases. Fact: I nearly died from a vaccine. Fact: Vaccines contained mercury[1] for decades and poisoned untold millions of people. Fact: Google now decides which facts you get to see.<p>I understand Google is trying to get rid of lots of useless add pages but determining &quot;truth&quot; is potentially just pushing an agenda and burying those facts they disagree with.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fda.gov&#x2F;BiologicsBloodVaccines&#x2F;SafetyAvailability...</a>

While i like to see some certain sites removed, i fear that this could give google too much power of what is considered &quot;truth&quot; and what not. Does anyone knows good literature about such things and their implications?

This sounds like an inverse information measure -- ranking sites highly based on their redundancy (repeated content).<p>And the people who are in the business of repeating their content in ever more inventive and adaptive ways are advertisers. So over time this seems likely to devolve into promoting the adverts and infomercials ahead of the content.<p>For instance rather than farming links, the spammers would switch to farming quotes or paraphrases. Expect &quot;one weird trick...&quot; to turn up a lot outside of just the advertising box, and the battle to be how then to stop the algorithms from classing it as truthy.

So if they count the absolute number of errors in a page, that&#x27;s yet another incentive to cut content in even more pages, that drive even more ads, and even more profit for Google.<p>On the other hand, if they count the relative truth in a page, pages will bloat with marginal content, will get harder to read, people will scan them more shallowly, and as a result we will end up having different versions of the same content page but with marginal content tilted on one direction or another. So we will need to use more web search. So another win for Google.<p>Sounds fair :)

Google makes money (via ads) by showing the results the user wants, not by showing the results the user should want. If I want to go to an anti-vaccination site to reinforce my pre-pre-existing beliefs, it&#x27;s hard to imagine Google will care, let alone make it more difficult to find it.

The thought of websites doing &quot;fact stuffing&quot; at the bottom of a page instead of keyword stuffing makes me smile.

Better title &quot;Google is <i>researching ways</i> to rank websites based on facts <i>along with</i> links&quot;<p>Not as sexy, but a bit more accurate.

This is an interesting case, and will probably be useful in some verticals, but not all. It&#x27;s widely thought and sometimes verified by Google that they treat different verticals differently in search. &quot;Payday loans&quot; searches are treated differently from &quot;New Macbook Air&quot; for example, in which case we don&#x27;t have to see it as an all or nothing approach. For example, today you only get the right-hand knowledge box on some searches, but not all.<p>I also wonder how New Scientist blanketing their page with ads like it&#x27;s 2003 is affecting their rankings?

&gt;&gt; Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.<p>But if there are contradictory sites then the web is not in unanimous agreement, is it? Something about this statement bothers me. Is there no chance that the web could be in &quot;unanimous agreement&quot; about something which is wrong? Seems to me that human populations make this mistake quite often, and since it is humans (for the most part) who write the web the same fallibility should show up there.

The article makes it sounds like they are replacing PageRank. According to the paper it&#x27;s orthogonal to PageRank. It&#x27;s just another signal to consider. The other assumption seems to be that this will cause site authors to fact-stuff. However it sounds like they more interested in using wrong facts to penalize a site than using correct facts to promote a site.

Is it just me or are google results getting worse with time? Five or six years ago I used to find everything on the first page of the first search, but these days I have to keep &quot;rephrasing&quot; my searches to find what I want.

Anddd this is why I no longer use Google but rely on DuckDuckGo.

I wonder how this will affect media companies&#x27; pagerank.

I wonder how the Goog will gauge the facts that Google sucks and that Google does evil.