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Google has made some changes to try and tackle "fake news":
Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.
To appear in Google News results, websites must meet broad criteria set out by the company, including accurately representing their owners or primary purposes. In an update to its guidelines released Friday, the search giant added language stipulating that publications not "engage in coordinated activity to mislead users." Additionally the new rules read: "This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises."
A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet. Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed organization, used that technique to reach an audience of nearly 500,000 people, spread primarily through Twitter accounts, Bloomberg reported earlier.
Also at Engadget.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday December 18 2017, @09:53PM (2 children)
The record-keeping part is definitely an anomaly, because all of those "records" are stuck in obsolete formats, some readable only on obsolete software, maintained only as long as the web server stays online [xkcd.com].
Someday, historians will look upon the 17th-20th centuries as a golden age for record-keeping that remains accessible to the future. Moving forward, all information will be stored electronically, kept alive only as long as it is useful. And when web servers cycle out of existence, some archivist may be able to take its dead husk and reverse-engineer the hardware interface and data formats to access and interpret the records (assuming it hasn't been recycled and the bits haven't rotted to oblivion), but she will NEVER be able to reconstruct the entire hypertext network that gave it context.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:36AM (1 child)
Yeah sites like archive.org are like airport lockers. For example even if a page is still on archive.org it doesn't really have a decent search engine[1] so it might as well be gone if you or other stuff are dead or don't remember it well enough (exact URL, keywords that work on archive.org).
For example there used to be a page about an amusing "engrish" menu, and the page was titled: May I take your order
Not easy looking for it with just archive.org
You need the actual URL: http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php [rahoi.com]
But that means you need another source/search engine to help you find that URL.
Last but not least if someone in the future takes over the domain and changes the robots.txt archive.org could make all the past archived stuff inaccessible (or maybe even delete it?). Ah seems they've stopped being retarded about it: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ [archive.org]
Took them quite a while to stop being retarded about it though...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:47PM
Archive.org is pretty much useless for all but the most mainstream non-english speaking websites. You'd be lucky if there's a single capture between 2000 to the present, and even then it will be 99.99% broken.