Can you tell truth from fiction? As a small firm practicing web design NH we like to think we can. Google is able to do just that, in theory.
The company is working on new ways to figure out which sites are more accurate than others. One day, sites that are more accurate might be ranked higher in search than sites that are not.
Right now, Google ranks websites by popularity and reputation as determined by the number of relevant links pointing to it, the time users spend on the site and how popular it is in social media. None of this, of course, has anything to do with how truthfulness a site might be. To counter this, Google engineers and researchers have created a “truth algorithm. They described their research in a paper published in New Scientist.
The algorithm works by analyzing Google’s “Knowledge Base” which contains almost three billion facts, all of which were extracted from the Internet. Cross-referencing related facts in the database and checking them against web pages that Google is crawling, could help determine the truthfulness of that page. Webpages that the Google algorithm determined to have a number of false claims could be de ranked on the search pages…again, in theory. Google has a long way to go before the research paper becomes a full- on algorithm that drives search results. As a web design NH, we’ll let you know when it affects SEO.
