And who, I might ask, is independently auditing Google's Knowledge Vault to see whether that data is accurate? Imagine how this search algorithm (when fully implemented by Google) will skew top-ranked web searches away from any site that doesn't follow the party line.

Google Researchers Are Ranking Web Pages By Facts Not Links
Jamie Condliffe
Gizmodo
Mar 2, 2015
http://bit.ly/1FOqpnj

[snip]

A team of Google researchers has developed a new way to rank pages, called Knowledge-Based Trust score. The system's not live—or, indeed, likely to be, at least for a little while—but it is is intriguing. Essentially, it provides results by counting the number of incorrect facts within a page, reports New Scientist.

It does that by looking up content and comparing it to Google's Knowledge Vault, a store of facts that have been pulled off of the Internet. The Vault is a pool of facts that are broadly agreed on online, which is judged by the researchers to count as proxy for truth. If web pages contain information that contradicts the Vault, they slide down the ranking.