Hello,

A pool of Google’s members has published a very interesting paper entitled Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources that proposes a new algorithm to calculate the ranking of web pages. They propose to move from exogenous signals to endogenous signals, that is, to replace popularity criteria with correctness information criteria. But, how to know the facts contained in a web page are trustworthy? Authors expose a methodology that begins with the automatic extraction of the facts from each source. Then, the trustworthy of these facts is evaluated “by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model”.  They call this trustworthiness score Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT).

Does it work? That seems, because the paper shows as manual evaluation confirms the effectiveness of the method applied to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from 119M web pages.

Will be the KBT the web ranking of the future?

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

For many of us, Google has represented always speed, precision and… neutrality. That means that Google does not manipule the SERP (Search engine results page) and  always show the most relevant entries for people. But after reading Enrique Dans’s post “Google and the right to manipulate search results” I am beginning to have my doubts.

On the basis of a judicial victory of Google in US courts about its Search Engine Page Results (SERP), Enrique Dans denounces that the California Giant editorializes its results of searches “so that instead of us finding the most relevant results, we first find those that offer its services”.

We even can see this change of paradigm in the way Google distributes results on SERP: “Google has reduced the space that natural results occupy to around 20% of the screen area, filling the rest with advertising and its own products”.

Troubled? I think we have reasons to be worried, but even this… Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona