Thursday, March 5, 2015

Google search results to be based on facts - what does it mean?

One of the short news blurbs in recent human memory (aka within the last week) was that Google is going to base their search results on facts instead of the number of links.

To someone like me, this snippet of information ranked second to the moon landing or to the real story of a certain day in history.

Helas, no details on what the fact search algorithm will do followed, unless you regard using a huge knowledge base as helpful. It is a fact. But beyond that?

How will the searched web display in front of our eyes?

Are we going to be reduced to NFL statistics like facts, useless bits of contrived importance?

Are cats going to take over not just Youtube, tumblr, or insta crap?

If the algorithm really uses facts, what will the consequences be for publications like Germany's Bild Zeitung, the Daily Mail, or the Daily Telegraph?

Unless you regard fawning about royalty as a fact, the latter should not appear in search results. Screaming kraut-bloid Bild Zeitung should fall off the edge of the internet, too.
The only facts that might save it are the measurements of its Page Everywhere naked girls, if - and only if - the measurements are correct. Which we will find out soon, right?

Or is Google's fact based approach to search another evil corporate ploy, designed to list hundreds of pages of assuredly factual corporate annual reports and the related stock charts before any other internet content item, and that includes cats. Although a cat is a fact.

Even Fritz the Cat is a fact.

What if you search for an alluring male artist, what are you going to get? Will the search results be based on the number of ITunes downloads or on penis size? Or both, and will NFL stats incorporate [needless pun alert] this detail in the future?

How will search results for religious terms or conspiracy theories be handled?

Did you consider that?

Unless you want to get blocked in a number of US states, my dear friends at Google [needless ingratiating blurb], you'd better find a way to give people their religion.  Don't worry about agnostics or atheists.
Will poems, fiction, satire, and parody finally be relegated to their well deserved place at the back of the search results bus? 

To avoid that this post ever makes it into the Google fact results, let's speculate about the algorithm.

The boring news: Statistics, statistics, more statistics, and probability.

And as a final thought: the PageRank will probably not go away altogether after all.

One more thing:
Will Bing follow, will they position themselves as a fact free choice, or will we all use DuckDuckGo for a non-homogenized search experience?

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