FILE – In this April 17, 2007 file photo, exhibitors work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany. Google said Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014 it will shut down its Google News service in Spain to prevent publishers’ content from appearing on it — ahead of a new law requiring the Internet search company to pay Spanish news organizations for linked content or snippets of news. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File) Internet search engine Google is considering the possibility of offering a system of ranking search results that sounds like something out of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel “1984.”
The system exists now only in a recently published research paper by a team of computer scientists, but the proposal says the system would evaluate the truth of information in a web page based on its own Knowledge Vault database. In other words, as reported by New Scientist, the search engine company would determine what truth is and rank page results based on its version of the truth.
But determining the truth in some situations, no matter how many so-called facts you have, is difficult. Indeed, truth often can be stated in a hundred different ways, all of them true.
The Ministry of Truth in “1984,” one of four ministries which govern the fictional nation of Oceania, functioned in opposition to its name, falsifying history and creating truth to offer a government-sanctioned version of events.
“Power,” party member O’Brien says to Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel, “is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Google currently determines search rankings based on popularity through an algorithm of variables centered on the number of incoming links to a particular web page.
As such, gossip websites like Gawker offering snippets of titillating news are ranked high in current rankings. Under the new system, based on what the research paper described as Knowledge-Based Trust, such sites would be ranked much lower because they are less trustworthy.
On the surface, the idea has some appeal. If fewer people extrapolated their daily “news” from gossip sites and more from ostensibly accurate news sites, the intelligent quotient of the country might rise several points.
But there’s no accounting for taste. If you traffic in gossip and innuendo, who’s to say you shouldn’t be able to quickly find your favorite site, especially if it happens to be the most popular one on a particular subject on the search engine?
Well, Google, that’s who.
What’s more important than the ranking of sites which tell you if Liam Hemsworth is dating Jennifer Lawrence, though, is that the truth will be determined by the search engine company (based on, among other services, the not-always-fact-filled Wikipedia).
Distrust vaccines? Most shouldn’t, but those who do would have to search a while to find what they’re looking for if the Knowledge Vault determines such information untrustworthy.
Hate Common Core? Higher standards are worth seeking, but those who have questions about its effectiveness and implementation would have to look hard to find the “anti” side.
Don’t believe in global warming? Evidence surfaces every week to buck up the argument of skeptics, but if Google is all in, those arguments won’t be easy to find.
The effectiveness of Obamacare? The efficacy of specific medical studies? The evidence of voter fraud?
How does Google see it? That’s what would be paramount.
It’s hardly a secret that the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company’s executives lean left in their politics. Just two years ago, for instance, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt explained on NPR why the company was cutting ties with an organization over its position on “climate change.”
“Everyone understands [it] is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” he said. “And so we should not be aligned with such people — they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
Top those concerns with the ability of tech-savvy programmers to game Google’s system, the potential inclusion in the Knowledge Vault database of fact-based half-truths, and the dislike by users of subtle changes in their web experiences, and you have the makings of a mockery of online truth.
No timeline exists for the implementation of such a system by the world’s most popular search engine, which not surprisingly receives more online advertising revenue than any other online company.
But Google, which has changed the way in which people “let their fingers do the walking” in the search for information, needs to refine such a system for trustworthiness that, at first blush, makes people reach back to their high school English reading lists to wonder if “1984” may have arrived — just 31 years late.