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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following? The GP's point was purely that currently there's no automated search result ranking mechanism that can take account of the expertise level of the author. It seems like a reasonable enough idea to me (though not without difficulties).

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> ranking mechanism that can take account of the expertise level of the author

I assure you that all major search engines use the author name of articles and blog posts and even posts of forums like HN for all kinds of purposes that end up influencing ranking. It's primarily for anti-spam (a user account with good content on one page probably has good content on another page), but is used to rank quality/expertise too.

They why do I get all kinds of SEO optimized results written by some low-wage content creator?

> Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following?

Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?

Galileo/Copernicus wrote about Catholicism? If a ranking system treats your expertise in one area as being relevant to another it's not doing its job. Accepted, religion is a bit of a special case given the way it tends to encourage views on subjects as broad as "how the universe came into being" or "how to be a good person" (and those views are almost never "religion isn't your best guide"), but a good page ranking algorithm should still be able to only apply "expertise" rating when it applies specifically to terms in the search phrase.

Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?

Only on the internet, where history can be distilled into a single-sentence quip.

In real life the truth is more complicated, but doesn't fit into a tweet.

Please point out the factually incorrect part instead of being broadly dismissive. The catholic church was only able to persecute Galileo and Copernicus in the first place because they were the only "trusted" source of information in their era, exactly as the GP comment is proposing to bring back to the present day.

Not really, Copernicus' entire life and all his decades-long studies were paid for by the catholic church and his research was accepted by the Pope himself, even to the point of being taught at Catholic universities. Noone "persecuted" him in any way.

It only changed over a hundred years later due to the opposition from the Protestants that his books became banned.

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