Social media have become the new custodians of knowledge. This matters.

But what I find most significant about Google's "Knowledge-Based Trust" project is Google's interest in trust in the first place.

The authors provide technical details for algorithms and machine-learning processes, but implicit in the entire project is a basic dissatisfaction with the current digital environment that Google helped create. And now Google wants to reform that media environment by redefining what it means to trust and what counts as authoritative knowledge in our digital age. In little more than a decade since its founding, Google is moving from helping us access the web pages we want to determining what web pages we should trust.