Can you handle the truth?

TechBlog (Houston Chronicle) blogged The Guardian reports that Google has filed a patent indicating it is, literally, searching for the truth.

When Diogenes wandered around ancient Greece searching for an honest man he carried a lantern. Will Google also need a lantern as it goes on an equally difficult task of searching for the truth?

The search giant apparently is bent on figuring out a way to determine what's real or not in news found on the Web:

Google, and its heavyweight competitors, are pouring billions of dollars and thousands of staff hours into trying to ensure that when you search on the internet, you receive not only exactly the information you want, but also information that is true. During the early days of the internet boom, it was predicted that search engines would gradually lessen in importance as users latched on to their favourite sites. But the opposite has proved true, with Google and its competitors becoming the way into the web for eight in 10 web users, according to Ask Jeeves. Google News, an offshoot that emerged directly from the company's policy of allowing its 2,700 staff to spend a fifth of their time on their own projects, links to 4,500 sources from around the world and has become a key source of traffic for the internet arms of traditional media giants. But it makes no claim for the sources' veracity or accuracy. Now Google is looking to develop technologies that factor in the amount of important coverage produced by a source, the amount of traffic it attracts, circulation statistics, staff size, breadth of coverage and number of global operations.

My prediction: Even if Google succeeds, wingnuts on both the left and right will accuse it of media bias.