Google has developed technology that will change search engine results from showing the most popular web page to the most factually accurate contents on the page.

The internet is a vast place where virtually anything is in reach of your fingertips. This unfortunately means the content found online is false, wrong, a rumor, or just information placed to lead somewhere down the wrong road.

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A research paper published by Google in February shed some light on how this problem could be fixed. Their solution was to rank search results by the accuracy of the facts and not by popularity.

For computers to evaluate the truth from a source, two things are needed: the fact and a reference work to compare it to.

The reference work has already been started on by Google in the form of the Knowledge Graph, which automatically shows the desired answer from one's searches.

The data that goes into the Knowledge Graph is taken widely from Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA World Factbook.

Thus, all Google has to do is reference the search against internal databases. To check if the fact is correct or not, Google just needs to look at all the site's knowledge triples and see how many agree or don't agree with the facts.

The paper also says Google's version of the truth would iterate over time with the possibility of even being used as a filter for search results.

The possibility is an interesting one as a random trial sampling of pages baffled researchers because only 20 of 85 factually correct sites were ranked highly in Google's search scheme.

With search engines pulling truth from the large seas of data of the internet, this could have great implications for Search Engine Optimization, civil society, and media literacy.

While the new technology opens up a world of potentials, it remains as a theoretical underpinning first. Google is on the right track as the theory and resources are already at hand, however.

Tagstruth, develop, Knowledge Graph