For example, this part:

"Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings."

For one thing, the web can't agree unanimously, and still have "contradictory" web pages. Second, just because a large number of websites agree on something, that doesn't make it true. Imagine that formula being used to identify the best political course of action, or the truest religion.

So I'll have to see more before I can fully sign off on this.

That said, it's a good start.

Why they weren't unhappy with themselves for pushing ugliness and baseless fear mongering, in the first place, is the real question.

hope it works out!

Can't help but wonder.

Why should google get to decide what is true and what isn't?

They are simply ranking pages with content less likely to be reliably true toward the bottom of the rankings.

"The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet."

I know I'm being annoying about this, but it can seriously work the wrong way. The internet believes circumcision is mutilation and that can be considered a fact. Will pro circumcision information be pushed down?

And I think that's the main goal. Active debates would remain toward the top, I guess.

I think it's possible to recognize sources that are legitimately presenting a debate, those which are likely to have content in the realm of scientifically proven objective facts, and those who are selling(usually literally selling) bullshit.

which among them have input?

much as you try to hide the fact that this is not some impartial act handed down from the sky, it still isn't

as much?

it would take a long time to list them all.

Shouldn't take long to answer that one.

old robber barons.

The folks who are worried about it are the ones who push anti-science memes regularly. That kind of tells us why the oppose something like this.

This is a necessary step.

and I think that, given good algorithms and databases (both areas of Google expertise) it could be a very useful thing - even game-changing to some extent.

I look forward to it, but I imagine it would also be easy for them to allow an account setting for people who prefer to opt out of fact-ranked search results.

them to things that the internet thinks are true.

That said, consensus does seem to be a stronger metric than popularity...

Whoever spreads more lies better wins.

Right now it seems like a good idea because it can potentially subvert the anti-science groundswell.

But it is deeply disturbing that Google will be the Truth Police. I can see a situation in which information contrary to the established 'truth' could be very hard to find.

It's time that the quacks stopped getting a free ride on their way to conning people into BS.

Of course the right-wing is mad about it, they live off misinformation

From Paul Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/on-the-liberal-bias-of-facts/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026321370

Most businesses are right wing, and Google was started by elements of the intelligence community with funding from the intelligence community. That's about as right wing as they come.

Who gives a rip about their phony 'truth ranking'?

But it's not just creationists and climate change deniers that are all the problem.....so too, I'm afraid, are ontological materialists, at least to an extent.....they are, unfortunately, kind of to 21st Century science(even more so than climate deniers), what eugenicists were to science in the 20th Century.....despite very little actual evidence to support their pet theories(for example-"mind = 100% product of the brain", "human = biological robot&quot , they have lots of funding and are often able to get away with browbeating fellow scientists whose conclusions don't necessarily line up with their own, and some actually go farther than that.

I mean, sure, most of them may not be nearly as inclined towards pure nastiness as many of the eugenicists were(or even some extreme AGW deniers, like Steven Goddard, or extreme creationists are today).....but their dogma is holding back science just as much as eugenics did in the prior century; which is a real shame, given all the new worlds that could be opened up if more people were willing to move past this outdated thinking(it can be argued that perhaps even the Scientific Method itself may need an overhaul).

But perhaps as humanity becomes more and more enlightened, there is hope-although it took roughly 75 years for eugenics to be mostly discredited, it no longer stands today, as unbiased modern science had come through with debunking it for all time, once the momentum finally built up enough. Perhaps, in my lifetime, ontological materialism will also go that same way. May it be so.

Last edited Sun Mar 8, 2015, 03:14 AM - Edit history (1)

I'd prefer results like "all you need is love" and "everything breaks for a reason" to be below the ones that are actually helpful.

I can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and listen to Art of Noise when I'm done fixing the damn washing machine.

I distrust truth dictated from the top down, with all challenge and dissent marginalized and quashed. There's always a very thin line between "neutral point of view" and some "privileged" point of view - whether it be "white male privilege" or "influence peddling" or the "military industrial complex" or some other power structure that skews the truth in its own interest somehow. Perhaps the facts are all true, but the only facts that are bothered with are the facts that benefit the elite...etc., etc.

Anyway, we ALREADY have crusty institutions in place to enforce a hierarchy of truth: academia, traditional journalism, government publications, etc. The Internet is supposed to be a popular *remedy* for the unilateral nature of those institutions, not a redundant reproduction of them. Does academia want to deliver it's scientifically vetted truths in digital format? Then they can stake claim to their own URLs and publish what they want. They do not need to take over all perspectival positions on the planet just to make sure that theirs is the only position that people can see.

If Google does proceed with such a thing, I would hope that's the final signifier for the people at large to dump Google as the search engine of choice. It would then be time to rebuild the Internet afresh, trying to rediscover its grassroots in personal web addresses (not mediated by Facebook), media exchanges liberated from the heavy surveillance of youtube and common P2P networks, and, most importantly, allow people to share, listen to, and prioritize any damned information they want.

If we as a society want people to handle information in a critical, responsible fashion, then the only place to implement that in a free society is by teaching people how to think critically and responsibly FOR THEMSELVES while they are in school. You DO NOT shape the information people receive or try to control "the masses" once they are free adults and are allowed, in theory, to form their own opinions about things.

Worried that a bunch of free adults are going to make stupid decisions and wreck the world now? Tough. Should have invested more in the educations system when you had the chance. Because as long as you want freedom for YOURSELF in America, there is no "free for me" but "control for thou".

Hailing this as a good thing is short sighted indeed.

The quacks have made searches very difficult for people who care about good evidence.

You don't have to use Google.

in order to make their worldview more comfortable.

There's two ways to become famous in academia. 1) Discover something. 2) Destroy someone else's discovery. 1 is really damn rare. So a lot more effort goes into 2.

That doesn't mean they'll get the results you want. But it means anything that survives the process for a while is likely to be true. E=mc^2 was ridiculed for years, until finally people couldn't find a way to tear it down.

You're saying that this can not lead to truth, but a random guy's "one amazing trick" that he can't quite demonstrate in an experiment but will sell to you for $39.95 is.




You can set up your own web site right now. DU wasn't created by facebook. If you think avoiding science to reach the truth is such a better approach, go right ahead and do it. The only thing in your way is the very small fee for registering a domain name.


I'm not a physicist. There are enormous complexities of quantum mechanics that I do not understand. As a result, it is not possible for me to form a rational opinion about it by myself.

That's why we have specialists who spend a lot of time learning about a subject. We can not know enough about everything to be properly informed about everything.


Yes, we can all achieve PhD-level familiarity with medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, engineering, computer science, and every other subject if only we spent more money on education.

I'm just saying it may not be the ONLY road to truth and academia ALREADY has it's venues for delivering its truth. So why take over the popular channel, too?

Want to make sure "the people" can get to the truth? Perhaps people would be reading science journals if Elsevier wasn't charging a few thousand dollars in annual subscription fees in order to overcharge libraries. Are "scientists" the ones having trouble getting through all "the quacks" on their searches? Well they ARE the ones with access to journals and a careful curated search system at university libraries. Last time I went to the Doe library at UC Berkeley to try to track down "The photoelectic effect without photons", I wasn't deluded with a ton of search results from "quacks". I went to the right venue for the material I wanted: an academic institution.

Regarding the web sites: you can set up a personal web site, but then it becomes very difficult to find you because of the way Google has de-valued individuals. People had to run to Facebook to "brand build" there because of Facebook's people directories and functions that were geared to building social connections and publishing to personal networks. If broader search engines made that type of thing available to personal web sites, Facebook wouldn't be necessary. I believe some pioneers are trying to develop this as we speak.

Regarding your snarky comments about adults not being able to make "free decisions" about quantum mechanics: there are two levels of discussion here. The free adults are taxpayers who get decide whether they want to pay to have people thinking about quantum mechanics. This is where basic education comes in: that's society's opportunity to give people the tools to figure out whether quantum mechanics might be a pursuit worth engaging in.

The other level is the study of quantum mechanics itself: the work of specialists. That takes place within academia. That already has institutions that support it (academia, foundations, International installations like CERN, government funding...) and venues to propagate its discoveries, chiefly peer-reviewed science journals. People who have the education to read an article on quantum mechanics should be able to figure out how to access one of these journals either through subscription, a library, or by going to it directly online.

Once again, I see no reason to eradicate the opportunity for alternative perspectives and voices simply because the quacks are irritating. If the quacks commit false advertising or steal money then we always have the remedy of arresting them and holding them up as an example to discourage imitators.

I am glad that Google is doing this

Google decides what is Good Science.
Oh, my, that will be convenient.
It would be time to stop using Google, that's all this will do.

The only problem is that this practice will likely seep over to other search engines, and they will have to provide a product that is just as good as what Google provides. Searches that are bogged down in quackery and BS are not good things.

Right. Can't squash everything but Big Pharma one way, try an end run.
If nothing else, I would start paging down through the results and considering the first page, at least, to be as corporately populated as Google shopping.
Or are you hoping for a totally corporately controlled internet, as to content.

The propaganda you are pushing here makes me wonder what your real objection to a science based search engine is.

based search engine? That sounds so very mcCarthy-ish. Bwah!
I think what is proposed is fine for people who WANT it, but to decide for everyone is just wrong.
But - there are ways around everything on the net.

He's the one who didn't care about reality. The fact that you think scam artists and quacks should get equal billing on a search engine is bizarre. There's no other way to put it. The Fox News, Alex Jones, anti-vaxers, and scam cancer treatment pushers are all quite McCarthyish in their rhetoric, in fact. Hmmm.

artist or a quack - for everybody else - is really disingenuous. Or delusional.
Will they weed out the pharmaceutical companies whose drugs turn out to cause cancer and/or death?

Sheesh.

time for a public open source search engine, corporations will eventually fuck up anything.

Right On!

This should be awesome!

It's a smart move, as it makes the product more useful for those who care about good evidence.

I was on a system that defaulted to yahoo search and I tried to use it...horrible. Terrible search engine.

Still, Google must have been getting complaints about this. I doubt this came out of a vacuum.

I bet assholes like Alex Jones and his fellow ghouls are livid!

I'm tired of doing searches and having those pages pop up at the top. Ugh.

do something about the TV charlatans like Pat and his 700 Club joke. Google is doing something the media needs to have done to it, rate it by how much bullshit it pumps out every minute!

Foxnews would be last, we already know this.

section of politics and commerce = fascism, you know.

You got a way of getting rid of the CIA legally and peacefully, I'm all ears.

certain.

But certainly US intelligence does not = CIA.

And certainly most of the big tech companies, particularly google, are emeshed in that milieu.

Yet it's very odd; democrats and particularly DUers seem remarkably OK with this. They *love* ordering things online and don't want to hear any criticism the tech leadership's anti-labor practices.

Even those who on other topics are pro-labor. It's very strange.

Small, large doesn't matter the size. They pull all the strings and have been doing so for the last 50 years.

intelligence operations?

Just because you hear most about CIA doesn't make it most powerful or active. Nor does it mean they're the only agency spying on congress (nor that congress isn't spying back...)

on the web pages of BP, Monsanto, etc.

"Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth."

I for one welcome my LOLcat overlords.