Believe everything you see on the Internet.

The Ministry of Information is setting aside 300 million yen ($2.6 million) in its 2007 budget to develop online automatic fact-checking software, which will sort search results by credibility. It is also allocating 5 billion yen ($43 million) into a public-private initiative to develop its own search engine that would rival Google and Yahoo!Japan. Japan is a country of tight state-society relations. Since the people default to trusting the government to take care of their best interests, the usual questions that become vote-swaying controversies don't always get talked about. I wonder what kind of reaction this one will incite, though. The Japanese loveWikipedia almost as much as they love those morning gossip shows on TV.* But they're also starting to dig the idea of open source. *According to Nielsen Net Ratings, Wikipedia has almost double the reach in Japan than in the US (7 million unique visitors as of Feb 06, more than tripling in 1 yr).