Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is ev... See more

The notion of epistemic sanctions clarifies what we might really mean by “consensus” in the context of public discourse — universal mutual listening , rather than universal agreement.

“Universal mutual listening” happens when publishers compete on the basis of trustworthiness, instead of on the basis of ‘facts.’

Competing on the basis of ‘facts’ most

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I suspect billions of people will be happy to receive their answers to complicated queries directly on the search results page, uninterested in where the information comes from, so long as it’s accurate enough.

But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism... See more