gregmelia

I’ve invented something … I’ll call it the verify-o-meter.

When the internet* was invented in the 1960s, people thought it would be used for file transfer and for remotely operating computers. What actually happened was … email. Since geeks first started shooting the digital breeze, people have pontificated pointlessly online. Nowadays, many people’s main experience of the net amounts to various forms of online chat, through what’s known as Web 2.0.

The web’s a great place to chat but it’s also a bizarre, bad place. Much of what you read online is uninformed drivel and many of the people are freaks**. Lots of them are so used to spouting unverifiable rubbish, they’ve lost all conception of actually checking their facts. You can point this out to them, but in the multi-threaded world of online debate, you’d soon spend your entire life*** doing other people’s research, rather than putting forward your own points.

What’s needed is a simple, easy method of verifying someone’s ability to do their own background checks and a metric that can be used to rank the value of someone’s opinions.

The value of your opinion should relate to the level to which you’re informed on an issue. Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, so they should be helpful here. I propose that any argument made in an internet discussion should be weighted according to how far down a Google search you need to look to find confounding information.

For example: Say that someone tries to convince me that horses have three legs. When I type “horse” into Google, the first result is a picture of a four-legged horse. There are about 146 million results for “horse”, but the very first result confounds my online friend’s argument. He obviously hasn’t bothered to use Google to verify his point before he made it! He therefore gets a very low score.

Let’s say another sparring partner holds forth on a subject but the first fact that scuppers any of his points is 900,000th out of 1 million Google hits. He may very well have done his research, but missed this obscure piece of information. He therefore gets quite a good verifiability score, 90%. These verifiability scores can then be used to weight the theoretical ‘punch’ of an argument, ensuring that people’s arguments are given less notice if they’ve obviously not checked them beforehand. The easier a subject is to research on Google, the less value is attached to an argument showing evidence of that research not having taken place.

I name my unit the voogle, which stands for “Verified by Google”. You as an internet user will possess from 0 to 1 voogles, depending on how many obvious blunders you make.

With a little technical innovation, the voogle could be used to create an automatic ‘ignore’ list, like the manual ones found on many discussion boards. First, an algorithm needs developing which will search Google to reliably establish the lowest page rank of any confounding information****. Next, someone needs to host a ‘voogle server’ that can store details of all web users’ voogle scores. Lists, forums, social notworking sites etc can then have code written to look up each user’s voogle score on the central server, then fade users’ posts depending on their voogle score. The posts of a user with a perfect voogle score (ie. one who always researched to exclude silly errors before posting) would have perfectly clear letters while the posts of someone with a voogle score of 0 (ie. a troll) would be totally blanked out and someone in between (ie. a lazy or stupid person) would appear in a hard-reading grey colour.

My metric is the voogle and my method could revolutionise the web. Who’s with me?
I am also publishing this on www.halfbakery.com, the home of half-baked ideas.

*Okay, I mean the ARPANET.
**Like me. I’ve made over a thousand posts on two internet forums, leaving aside the one I administer.
***A life that you should be spending doing something else. Admit it, if you’re chatting online, you’re procrastinating from work. I should be writing something else this very minute.
****If you’d like to do this as a PhD, talk to EPSRC to get some funding. I’d fund you, but I’m too tight.