BOSTON - BostonChron -- Knobull makes it easier for users to fact-check responses, but this academic search engine is also leveraging its ability to gauge a website's authority on a subject to decrease the likelihood of inaccuracies in the first place.

Lynn Bentley, President of Knobull announced, "This is a search engine engaging in friendly and authentic conversation about a user's query backed up with primary references."

When a user asks Google for help finding something online, it responds with a ranked list of what it believes are high-quality, relevant results — but the first few results aren't necessarily the highest quality or most relevant options.

Often, these top spots are filled by ads linking to sites related to the query. The owners of those websites pay Google when users see or click on the ads, and that search ad money accounts for 60% of its revenue.

This means Google users regularly have to scroll past advertisements to get to the search results they want, and they have to accept that the company is tracking them and monetizing their personal data.

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Unlike Google, Knobull is privacy-focused — the company doesn't share or sell its users' data for profit — and instead of relying on ad revenue it receives commissions from corporate partners that users can choose to access on its homepage.

The idea is to eliminate the conflict of interest between the user and the advertiser over search results by making the search engine revolve solely around the needs of searchers.

"As we look at a page, we understand its contents, incoming links, and other authority signals that tell us whether the page is important and useful," explained Bentley.

And because Knobull's search service is constantly crawling the web and indexing new pages, it gathers the most relevant results.

Knobull is now beta testing a feature that works — delivering conversational, text-based responses to queries — but without those shortcomings.

"Knobull shows a synthesized simple answers summarizing the most relevant learning resources to a query," Bentley says. "Importantly, references and citations are directly embedded in the answers captured from 5 billion learning sites, enabling users to determine the authenticity and trustworthiness of the result."