The Internet is without question the greatest information resource ever invented. Unfortunately, it is also one of the worst.
That is because there is no gatekeeper to fact-check the veracity of information. Every crackpot idea vies for supremacy with truth and frequently wins because search engines typically sort results by counting links to a site or page, essentially by popularity.
A great example of this is Lyme disease, which I wrote about last year (“Ticked off by flawed Lyme disease bill,” Thinking Critically, December 18, 2014). The first result in a search for “chronic Lyme disease” is the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, which is a deluded, albeit well-meaning, advocacy group that believes strongly in ongoing infection despite all the evidence to the contrary.
It actually says, “It is reasonable to assume that some patients suffer from persistent infection whereas others suffer from immune-mediated post-infectious damage.”
No, it is not “reasonable to assume” something that is not borne out by the evidence.
The Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (AMMI) Canada, its U.S. counterpart the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the prestigious Centers for Disease Control and the United Kingdom Health Protection Agency all agree there is no such thing as chronic Lyme infection.
By the way, AMMI did not even appear on the first page of my search results.
Another result that was very high up the list was WebMD, a very popular source of “medical information for a lot of people. The site actually does comprise some sound information, but it also advocates all kinds of pseudoscience and alternative medicine.
Suffice it to say, a person must be more vigilant than most people are to make sure they are getting the best information when he sits down in front of his computer.
Google, though, the most popular search engine in the world, may be on the verge of changing the way search results get sorted.
For many years now, Google has been populating a database of facts and building a new algorithm they call their Knowledge-Based Trust system.
In a recently published paper, Google researchers explain that the company will rank websites and web pages with a “truth score,” which is determined by the number of incorrect references.
This is certainly an admirable endeavour. If done correctly it would mitigate the impact of, for example, celebrity, in determining what gets sifted to the top of the pile.
Of course, I see some danger here as well. The 2.8 billion “facts” Google has accumulated were extracted from the very same source of data that feeds the engine’s search results, the web.
I certainly hope the company will have the “knowledge vault” vetted by experts before it goes live because it could be a real boon to the world burying the likes of Oprah, Dr. Oz and Jenny McCarthy under less popular but more reliable sources of information.
