What to believe?
In the present day and age, people are relying more and more on the internet as the go-to information network for true and accurate information. It’s faster and more readily available than other media such as television, radio and newspaper. When people are uncertain about a fact or some other piece of information, they’ll typically just google it to verify the information. But how do we know what is true and what is false? The “rapid spread of misinformation online” (Vis) is becoming a global concern as people take things they find online to be true and continue to pass it on through their social networks without thinking to re-verify the information. Furthermore, the accessibility of internet speeds up the spread of information considerably, which can cause small misinformation to escalate quickly into much larger problems. As a result, search engines must be able to return the most accurate and relevant results to the user and one way to accomplish this is through analysis of the information network of a website.
On the internet, websites represent nodes and links represents paths to these nodes. Both true and false information spread in a similar manner so how can we identify which websites to trust? There are two factors contributing to the reliability of a webpage: the number of paths leading to and from the page, and the endpoints of each path. It may seem logical to think that a website with lots of paths leading to and from it is one of great value, however it’s important to also take human nature into account. People tend to like sharing things that are ridiculous or over the top because it is entertaining to them. For example, memes, viral videos, and gossip are frequently shared on Facebook and Twitter, probably many times more than news and research discoveries. However accuracy of information conveyed through those channels is often very low. Therefore rather than the number of connections, the endpoint of each connection is of greater importance in determining the trustworthiness of a webpage. A page connected to well-known research institutes is naturally more reliable than a page connected to The Onion. Nonetheless, that is not to say that the number of connections doesn’t matter at all. A fact supported by multiple reliable sources is generally considered more accurate than one supported by one or two sources. Consequently, it is extremely important that a search engine base their search results on both the number of connections to a particular website and the reliability of the websites’ connections, and people must exercise great caution in evaluating the dependability of information found online.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/24/tackle-spread-misinformation-online