Google Sidewiki: mostly worthless for showing how political sites are lying or misleading

Google has launched a new service called "Sidewiki" (link) that's a bit of a universal commenting system. If you have their toolbar installed, you'll see comments that others have left about the current webpage; see screengrabs at the link.

And, because the comments are ranked from "best" to "worst", this will simply reinforce the status quo at most sites in most cases. In other words, it won't help those like me who try to point out how MSM articles are lying or misleading. For instance, most visitors to the DailyKos will agree with their point of view. They'll vote down comments that point out how a specific post is misleading, and vote up comments that reinforce the article. Likewise with visitors to RedState or other partisan sites. The same goes to a lesser degree for MSM sites.

Only in specific cases - such as with a very popular article that's the focus of one group - will contrary information rise to the top. And, of course, since most people who are online and who are willing to engage in online activism are on the "liberal" side, they'll stand a better chance of getting their comments to the top.

But, wait, it's going to get even worse. Here's what Google says about their ranking system:

Using multiple signals based on the quality of the entry, what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging, we work hard to ensure that only the highest quality, most relevant entries appear in the sidebar. Most of the engineering work for Sidewiki was dedicated to this ranking algorithm.

What that means is that those who post contrary information - no matter how accurate and useful - will - after all their comments are voted down by partisan hacks - get a low overall ranking and will probably end up at the bottom of every list if they even show up at all. That's not exactly smart, unless that's how it was designed to work.

See popular voting systems for previous examples, including those involving Google and Youtube.

Wed, 09/23/2009 - 09:40 · · Importance: 4