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 (鈥淭icked off by flawed Lyme disease bill,鈥� Thinking Critically, December 18, 2014). The first result in a search for 鈥渃hronic Lyme disease鈥� 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, 鈥淚t is reasonable to assume that some patients suffer from persistent infection whereas others suffer from immune-mediated post-infectious damage.鈥�
No, it is not 鈥渞easonable to assume鈥� 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 鈥渕edical 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 鈥渢ruth score,鈥� 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 鈥渇acts鈥� Google has accumulated were extracted from the very same source of data that feeds the engine鈥檚 search results, the web.
I certainly hope the company will have the 鈥渒nowledge vault鈥� 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.
