I got a little philosophical after reading a couple of articles yesterday.
- Why This Longtime Google Fan Now Prefers DuckDuckGo
- Should search algorithms be moral? A conversation with Google’s in-house philosopher
I remember some of my first experiences with a search engine. I’m guessing that it was with Altavista. I was impressionable, I guess. I couldn’t get over how I could send a request out through a wire and get an answer back almost immediately.
I didn’t go to school with this technology. We had libraries with books and stuff. If you needed an answer to a question, you’d make the trip to the library before or after school or at lunch and start looking. There was a sense of satisfaction that arose when you found the answer to your question. It didn’t really even enter into consideration that there might be another resource in the library that had a different answer or a different take on the question – I had the answer.
I guess, in hindsight, I had a great deal of faith in our librarian that she would only make available to us resources that only had right answers. After all, she got paid a lot of money to do what she did. It had better be correct. The school activities didn’t really make us explore alternative answers. Our goal was to get the work done and then move on to the next task or hopefully go outside and play.
So, Altavista was a godsend. I didn’t have to go to the library anymore and look in a book. I could just search for it.
As we know now, the concept of search just exploded. We now have so many search engines just a click away.
I remember sitting next to a friend at a computer meeting and his default opening webpage was a list of search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos, Dogpile, Canada.com, etc.
You might find this list interesting “Top 15 Most Popular Search Engines | October 2015“. Check out the list of hits and you’ll see a clear winner.
Photo credit: wintersixfour from morguefile.com
I remember either hearing this in a presentation or in an article that I had read “Today’s student will find the answer to any research in the first 10 hits of Google Search”.
Of course, for my teacher-librarian friends, we know that this has spawned a whole teaching sub-industry of fact checking and reasonableness of results. A great example of this is happening right before our eyes with the current election and the different spins on facts that the leaders are taking. They’re all truthful to some and questionable to others. It’s another case of whoever shouts the loudest wins.
Today’s search engine is considerably different than those that we cut our teeth on. Now, there are legal disclaimers about content, the site provides current news feeds in addition to search, advertising is sold on the site, you get instant answers, you get related answers, the search engine does a spell check for you, some search engines track what you’re searching for and where you go next, etc. A company can even pay to get higher placement in search results.
Search engines will even buy placement in your web browser based on the logic that the average user won’t change the default search engine.
In theory, if a search engine was looking to provide the correct and best answer, shouldn’t they all return the same results? But just like newspapers and their points of view, search engines have different indexing and searching algorithms to return results.
There are so many factors that go into the choice of a search engine. When someone expresses a preference for a particular search engine, I like to ask why. So often, I’ll get the answer “because they give the best results”. Really? How do you know? Are they factually correct more often than not or is it like a newspaper and gives you the slant that you’re comfortable with?
So, dear reader, if you’ve stuck with me this far – whose answers do you trust best and why?
doug --- off the record 