by Angela Guess
Barbara Starr recently wrote in Search Engine Land, “The notion of trust is a key component in the semantic web. [To the left] is an illustration that depicts the semantic web stack, with trust sitting at the top.Trust is achieved through ascertaining the reliability of data sources and using formal logic when deriving new information. Computers leverage or mimic this factor in human behavior in order to derive algorithms that provide relevant search results to users. Search Result Ranking Based on Trust is, in fact, the name of a Google patent filed in September 2012. The patent describes how trust factors can be incorporated into creating a ‘trust rank,’ which can subsequently be used to alters search result rankings in some fashion.”
Starr goes on, “People tend to trust information from entities they trust, so displaying search results to users from entities they trust makes a lot of sense (and also brings in a personalization component). A group at Google recently wrote a paper titled, Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources. The paper discusses the use of a trustworthiness score — Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) — which is computed based on factors they describe therein.”
Starr quotes the paper: “We propose using Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) to estimate source trustworthiness as follows. We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source.”
photo credit: Search Engine Land
