This story raises an interesting idea: In the next five years, Google may debut an instant fact-checking program. Of course, the search engine itself can pretty much do this now if you’re willing to poke around and read some articles, but this program would run statements against a database of information to calculate likelihood of truth (say, a 99 percent chance that “the sky is blue” is true).
But as with Wikipedia and Google itself, the contributors or maintainers could use it in a biased fashion. And let’s not forget about the Google bomb, the practice of linking to a certain site with certain words — say, linking to George Bush’s site with the words “miserable failure” — to drive the site to the top of the term’s Google search results. The company makes zero effort to curtail this practice, even when specific cases are reported and documented. Would the fact-checking program have this vulnerability?
This is an interesting proposal that could do a lot of good, but the public will have to remain vigilant about how it’s maintained, its accuracy and the biases of those involved.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
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