For example, when searching for the age of the earth, only web pages indicating an accurate age would be returned.
Would such a search engine be viable commercially?
Sometimes the truth can be unpleasant.
If anything, I think the opposite approach would work better. Expose people to all viewpoints including ones that disagree with their world view. To paraphrase Justice Brandeis, the best answer to bad speech is more speech.
It would not include any web pages that present the other side of the debate.
It would exclude all conspiracy theories.
"Evolution" is a big, broad weasel word. If you mean species variation due to natural selection pressures? Sure. Intra-species changes? Okay sorta, although such things are really hard to observe. The origin of life, the universe, and everything? Probably not. At least not in such broad and vague terms.
Evolution is more of a general idea of how things work which is then honed and applied specifically in different circumstances. It's not truth in the sense that Newton's Laws are truth. The broad term is much too vague to be included in a truth engine, in my opinion. It's not that it's false -- I believe the correct phrase is that it's not even false.
And you would understand this if you weren't part of the evil cabal that lives in my bathroom sink!
Ok. Sorry about that last part.
Newton's laws are not truth but merely an approximation that suffices in most cases.
Programmers and technicians deal in booleans -- yes or no answers. I know a couple of times I've heard people around here get frustrated when we start talking about the meanings of words. They just want simple declarative statements: evolution is true, detractors are wrong. Global Warming is true, detractors are wrong. etc.
Analysts, or people who have to translate from human languages to programming on a regular basis, understand that truth is such a slippery concept as to be almost meaningless. I can have three people in a room and have them discuss what a program is going to do until everybody is happy, and then still there are misunderstandings. Language is just too slippery for universal truth operations.
Or put another way, save universal truth for the philosophers.
Ultimately, a human (or multiple humans) would have to decide what was true, and what was false. I would almost be amused to see somebody ATTEMPT to do this job.
What about well-established scientific THEORIES (i'm not sure what is the definition of a scientific truth) that turn out to be false or inaccurate after decades of being well-established?
What if such a well-established theory is in the process of being disproven or replaced with a better theory - which happens to be "the other side of the debate" today?
If a theory is not the truth but is good enough in practical cases, such as Newton's Laws, then that's fine.
Think of all the FUD around climate change research. Do YOU know exactly which studies are valid and which ones aren't? Do you just hire climatologists to tell you? WHICH ones do you hire?
How do you define "good enough in practical cases"?
I could keep going like this.
I'm not even worrying about commercial viability, I'll make the assertion that what you're proposing to build is impossible to build. My reasoning is that you're trying to fit things without a universally accepted definition - "truth" or "scientifically accepted" - into an absolute, binary system - "include" or "exclude". That is impossible to do correctly or completely.
At best, you either end up with something fairly arbitrary, or you end up with a system which only includes the "facts" accepted by everyone, and excludes anything controversial. This ranges somewhere between useless and downright harmful, in my opinion (if this system is accepted as "truth", then new ideas have that much more of an uphill battle to be accepted).
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...