| | Web of lies? Historical knowledge on the Internet (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-10) |
 | | Breaking these Web pages apart into individual words, it would look in particular for words that look like years (i.e., positive three- and four-digit numbers), and indeed it would find many instances of “1840” and “1926” (Monet’s birth and death years, which appear on most biographical pages about the artist). |
 | | Statistically put, the software saw a number of possible years on Web pages about Hamilton, but on pages that discuss his birth there were two particularly tall spikes around the numbers 1755 and 1757, with the latter being slightly taller among the highest-ranked pages on the Web (and thus H-Bot’s given answer). |
 | | For instance, it may be that when a topic is discussed on many Web pages that end in.com but not on many pages that end in.edu (compared to the relative frequency of those top-level domains on the Web in general), the program could raise a flag of suspicion. |
| www.firstmonday.dk /issues/issue10_12/cohen (8395 words) |