Google has developed a technology to tell whether ‘facts’ on the Internet are true

The Internet, we know all too well, is a cesspool of rumor and chicanery.
But in a research paper published by Google in February — and reported over the weekend by New Scientist — that could, at least hypothetically, change. A team of computer scientists at Google has proposed a way to rank search results not by how popular Web pages are, but by their factual accuracy.
To be really clear, this is 100 percent theoretical: It’s a research paper, not a product announcement or anything equally exciting. (Google publishes hundreds of research papers a year.) Still, the fact that a search engine could effectively evaluate  truth, and that Google is actively contemplating that technology, should boggle the brain. After all, truth is a slippery, malleable thing — and grappling with it has traditionally been an exclusively human domain.
Per this recent paper, however, it’s not too difficult for computers to determine whether a given statement is true or false. Basically, to evaluate a stated fact, you only need two things: the fact and a reference work to compare it to. Google already has the beginnings of that reference work, in the form of its Knowledge Graph — the thing that displays “August 15, 1990” when you search “Jennifer Lawrence birthday,” or “American” when you search “Obama nationality.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/02/google-has-developed-a-technology-to-tell-whether-facts-on-the-internet-are-true/

How do we know if this article is true fact?

eddie wrote:How do we know if this article is true fact?

Did you try to google it?

Will there be a separate category or registry for Fox News accuracy?

Fox News, as you may know, seems to have a separate meaning of 'factual accuracy'. Maybe something like Real Truth, and then Fox Truth.

Original Quill wrote:Will there be a separate category or registry for Fox News accuracy?

Fox News, as you may know, seems to have a separate meaning of 'factual accuracy'.  Maybe something like Real Truth, and then Fox Truth.

Facts vs. truthiness

Brasidas wrote:

eddie wrote:How do we know if this article is true fact?

Did you try to google it?

Yes it took me straight to this thread