Google aims to stop the internet lying to you

Last year saw a huge number of fake news stories surge to worldwide popularity - with 'spoof' sites deliberately perpetrating hoaxes such as the idea that Paul McCartney was replaced with a double in 1964.

But a tweak to Google's algorithm could put paid to sites which set out to deceive.

The new system looks for verified facts in a page, and could place entries high up in Google results according to how many facts there are in a page.

At present, Google ranks sites using an algorithm which 'counts' how many other sites link to them - so sites which are deliberately inaccurate, but popular, can still rank highly.

The new system would prioritise web pages with few falsehoods - or errors - over pages which reported the truth.

'We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source,' the researchers say.
 
'A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.'

Google finds facts in its huge 'Knowledge Vault' and checks them against other sources - so, for instance, fake news stories with inaccurate geography and made-up names would be ranked down.

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The system isn't live yet, and was shown off in a Cornell University paper.

A company spokesman told Business Insider, 'We don’t have any specific plans to implement it in our products. We publish hundreds of research papers every year.'