As pains your chest and left arm take your breath way you are fortunately at the keyboard and immediately Google “chest pains.” This is your lucky day because there’s lots of information on this currently urgent topic. The pain in your head, however, has just overshadowed the one in your chest as you try to figure out which of the 233,000,000 results you should be consulting. The first thing you naturally do is review Google’s algorithm for ranking the results. Uh, oh, forgot to specify ‘recent articles’ only, when you notice that the first reference is “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” by Andreas Vesalius, a prominent 16th century physician. True, Mr. Vesalius is updating the findings of the great the 2nd century physician, Galen of Pergamon but, really, you probably want something a tad more recent. But while timeliness is good, the next result, telling you to pray, quickly brings the issue of reliability to the fore. How might you judge the dependability of this advice from the Vatican medical team? And so it goes with internet searches for those in a hurry, with imminently pressing issues.
You may have guessed, not because you have actually ever done so, the most researched topic on the web is SEX, followed by Technology and Health. This info comes from a site whose reliability has not been ranked. But, who cares, as most people believe this to be the case. Even if other sites, also reliability-unverified, call this a myth. So let’s move on and boldly state it is safe to reveal that “how to” is, sadly, not the angle sex researchers mostly explore, unlike the technology researchers. The latter searches also spike with popular new product releases and around gift giving holidays when the world’s misers look for the cheapest possible alternative that will at the very least turn on and not disintegrate before they go into hiding. This is a reliability issue for another time.
The problem of reliability is not new to the age of Googling. It’s been around forever. Take the 9th century Annals of St. Bertin that revile the East Frankish kings as murderers and heretics while the Annals of Fulda use terms such as “The Pious” and “The Peaceable” to describe the very same folk. Or, if you’re burning to find out more about Fulk Nerra and happen upon a detractor’s chronicle you will find out that this very same 10th century, enlightened thug, Fulk of Anjou, was a “plunderer, murderer, robber, and swearer of false oaths” and not much on his building of Anjou into a regional power to be reckoned with.
But, the good news is you will always find what you’re looking for if you already have a solid view on the matter at hand. Should you need confirmation, for example, that the Egyptians used electricity to keep their pyramids well lit then there are 1,680,000 results to choose from when you Google “pyramids and electricity.” As long as you don’t worry about the reliability of these warm confirmations then you can smugly carry on an informed discourse with anyone, and feel assured that they are rolling their eyes out of vindictive jealousy at your breadth of knowledge on this obscure subject.
For the few among us, in this age of advocacy, shamefully fearful about being misled, and looking for ways to check on the reliability of information coming off the internet, there are few rules to follow. Look for: author credibility; who sponsored the information; contacts; currency; purpose of page; verifiability; page links; and other indicators of potential biases that may have crept into the information. For example, the health benefits of sugar, salt and fat may not be most fairly argued by the site of a fast food company.
Good luck in finding the information you need or, for that matter, want, a much easier proposition.
Dr. Werner, I can assure you that most people won’t see anything related to Vesalius on their first page of Google results about “chest pains” — my guess is you do because you are an avid medievalist, and you experience something called a “filter bubble” (feel free to look up the term — there is a good TED conference about it) — in this case, Google making assumptions based on your history profile to try to guess what really you are looking for when you type the two elusive terms “chest pains”.
This is not unrelated to the topic at hand: our digital gatekeepers are aimed at pleasing us, not educate us, to show us what we want to see, not what we should see on a purely factual basis.
And there is another phenomenon in play: in the country I live in, at least 30% of the population are functional analphabets, yet, according to a recent IPSOS pool, 80% of the population expressed at least once a social or political idea or opinion online in the last year in public forums. No mater how we run those numbers, the two sets cannot be disjoint: In this context, we cannot be surprised that a lot of poor quality material end up online. To conclude on one of my favorite Rick Cook quote: “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”
Thank you Sylvain for your insightful observations. The snubbing of Vesalius is unacceptable and a disservice to all those analphabets who wish to perish from cardiac arrest. I shall immediately lodge a complaint with Google about this oppressive nanny search engine. As far as TED conferences are concerned, they have gone the way of most once-thoughtful symposia and become food (back to the original Greek eating and drinking parties I suppose) for the short attention span (sound bites). I do very much like the Rick Cook quote; very apropos.