The proliferation of widespread Internet access has enabled everyone and their dog to start a website, but not every one is filled with what some of us would describe as "credible" information. That's why some researchers are attempting to create software that can analyze Web content and automatically rank it to help out those who can't quite decide for themselves.

Researchers at the Austria-based Know-Center are working on a program that analyzes the language used on blogs in order to rank them as highly credible, having average credibility, or "little credible." The code looks at the distribution of words over time, and compares blog topics against articles from mainstream news, which are apparently weighted as being more credible.

"It has shown promising results, we think we are on the right path," Know-Center researcher Andreas Juffinger said at the World Wide Web conference in Madrid this week, according to the AFP. "It has to be automatic because it is not possible for customers to label and read all these blogs."

Of course, comparing the facts and opinions posted on blogs to the mainstream media may not be the best way to determine credibility. The beauty of the Internet is that people can write openly on almost any topic, and they may disagree heavily with the angle presented by certain news sources. Those people will undoubtedly be miffed at automatically being categorized as "little credible" just because their opinions may differ.

Also showcased at the conference was a system developed by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan that may offer a more balanced view to eager Internet readers. The software attempts to gather a number of different viewpoints on a particular topic and present them together to the user on a "statement map" to show how they are related. And finally, researchers at the University of Udine in Italy presented a paper outlining an algorithm that assigns quality scores to Wikipedia articles and their authors in order to help users better determine whether what they're reading is coming from a reliable source. But with apparently few differences in accuracy between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, such a tool may be more of a novelty for spotting obvious vandals than anything else.