An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search
By DAMON DARLIN
NYT
WHEN a kidney stone had me writhing in pain a few months back, I did what a lot of people with medical ailments do: I headed straight to Google for help with a self-diagnosis.
In 0.18 seconds, Google led me to 1.9 million pieces of advice, both good and suspect. Drink plenty of water and try to tough it out, but go to the doctor if it doesn’t go away — that seemed to be the consensus. But also among the search results were how-to articles like one saying that if I sipped tea brewed from ground celery seeds or corn silk, the stone would pass within hours. My laughter didn’t reduce the pain.
Ultimately, with the help of several quarts of water, the stone passed. But I learned one thing from the Google search results. While you get them very rapidly, they may not be all that useful and dependable.
It isn’t hard to see why. A considerable amount of human effort is spent gaming Google results. Practitioners of the art call it search engine optimization, or S.E.O., and it is used to move a retailer’s Web pages or a news organization’s articles to the top of the search results page. Web pages are created specifically to fool Google’s search algorithm in order to get a higher ranking.
(More here.)
NYT
WHEN a kidney stone had me writhing in pain a few months back, I did what a lot of people with medical ailments do: I headed straight to Google for help with a self-diagnosis.
In 0.18 seconds, Google led me to 1.9 million pieces of advice, both good and suspect. Drink plenty of water and try to tough it out, but go to the doctor if it doesn’t go away — that seemed to be the consensus. But also among the search results were how-to articles like one saying that if I sipped tea brewed from ground celery seeds or corn silk, the stone would pass within hours. My laughter didn’t reduce the pain.
Ultimately, with the help of several quarts of water, the stone passed. But I learned one thing from the Google search results. While you get them very rapidly, they may not be all that useful and dependable.
It isn’t hard to see why. A considerable amount of human effort is spent gaming Google results. Practitioners of the art call it search engine optimization, or S.E.O., and it is used to move a retailer’s Web pages or a news organization’s articles to the top of the search results page. Web pages are created specifically to fool Google’s search algorithm in order to get a higher ranking.
(More here.)
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