TheWhippinpost - 5:32 pm on Feb 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Although I have a couple of "issues" with MHes's synopsis - mainly because I've not witnessed the "950" phenomenom, and I think the cluster of documents should be viewed more widely to encompass all web pages that fit the topic queried - I think he's close (at least to the model I have in my head anyway).

One potential problem keeps haunting me in all this though...

We could safely say, I think, that Einstein's paper on Relativity is the authoritive document on the subject. From that paper we're introduced, for the first time, to the phrase, "Theory of Relativity".

And from that phrase we would somewhere expect MC(squared) and so on...

OK, so let's imagine that from the point of publication, a million documents are written by students, teachers, scientists, hobbyists, whoever...

And every one of those documents are wrong - They talk about (and refer to) each others documents and conclusions. They introduce along the way, other phrases which become a part of the community's language... but they are wrong, and have skewed Einstein's works.

What, and how, could Google combat that false-positive?

... and then relate that to your own field?

(Incidentally, Einstein said that, fact is truth, because we agree it is (or words to that effect), this false-positive example underlines the danger of that, for Google (and us), quite nicely.)

[edited by: TheWhippinpost at 5:37 pm (utc) on Feb. 11, 2007]