24 July 2011
Google web search is essentially useless as a research tool, as illustrated by this Language Log post which points out that the search engine conflates Freud and Darwin.
Google search results are optimized to help you find a particular site, not to provide information about language use or other data. The combination of personalized search results, based on things like you’re location and search history, plus the algorithms that automatically amend your search parameters mean that one person’s result is not going to be the same as another’s. There was a time when you could rely on the number of raw hits as a rough approximation of a term’s popularity on the web, but with Google’s constant updating of the algorithm’s that power the site, this is no longer the case.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Google has gotten a lot better at serving up exactly what you want. Nowadays it is rare for me to go beyond the top ten results to find the site I need. The other day I did a Google search on “running shoes Toronto” and the number one result was a store right around the corner that I did not know existed. I promptly walked over and bought a pair. (Google obviously knew where I was, thanks to my use of Google Maps, which can be a bit unsettling, but was damn useful.) It used to be the case that any Google search for a hotel turned up hundreds of supersaver travel sites, offering low prices on generic hotel rooms. Finding the website of an actual hotel was next to impossible. But nowadays, a search for hotels actually turns up the hotel web sites, with the sites offering “great deals” buried down below. But this commercial convenience does mean that trying to make any type of objective observations based on Google results is fruitless.
