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1) If there are 8 billion Web pages, there is no way anyone can rate even a meaningful subset of them by hand. Google's voting system, while imperfect, strikes me as a pretty good way to do this automatically. 2) The problem with any system of "experts" is deciding who the experts are. Main-stream journalism may at least be fact-checked, but it's not clear the world will ever agree that those writing about a particular topic are indeed "experts" to anyone beside their peers. If you don't believe this, read US and European articles about the same topic and see if you think they're even covering the same event. 3) The Web is a like a great, big bar with a zillion drunken conversations. You'll meet some interesting people, discover some dubious facts, and have a good time, but anyone who trusts it implicitly is asking for trouble, and all the ratings in the world are never going to convince the black helicopter crowd [1] that the UN isn't really invading the US. -- Ron [1] For non-US readers, there are a number of people in the US who are convinced the UN is out to conquer the US militarily. For example, see http://sss.org/lbh/helos.html, or just get the T-shirt at http://www.jeffersonstate.com/blackhelicoptercrowd.html. And while it is easy to dismiss such people as lunatics, you might not want to do so to their face in a crowded bar.
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