I came across an interesting blog post over at The Lay Scientist last week which discussed a paper written in 2002 that looked at search results from the leading search engines of the day when you typed in ‘vaccinations’. It found that on Google of the first 10 websites that came up 100% were anti-vaccination promoting sites. This really shocked me and although the blog post did go onto reveal the situation is now much better I wondered what other pseudoscientific beliefs and conspiracy theories were being indirectly promoted by the world’s premier search engine.
I typed in a number of issues relevant to the scientific and sceptical society to see what Google came up with. I limited my results to what came up on the first page, the first ten results and the sponsored links.
“Vaccinations” – 2 out of 10 search results promoted an anti-vax philosophy. None of the sponsored links did.
“Climate Change” – 1 out of 10 search results promoted a climate change denial philosophy and none of the sponsored links.
“Moon Landing” – 2 out of 10 search results promoted the moon landing hoax although a further 3 made reference to the moon landing conspiracy being debunked or a myth. None of the sponsored links referred to the moon landing hoax at all.
“Swine Flu Treatment” – 1 out of 10 search results promoted quack treatments (homeopathy and ayurvedic medicine). Another 1 of the sponsored links offered homeopathic remedies for swine flu.
“Homeopathy” – 7 out of 10 search results led to websites that promoted the use of homeopathic treatments. Of the three that didn’t, one was Wikipedia, one was UK Skeptics website and the other was an article by the Daily Mail (yeah shocked me too). All of the sponsored links promoted homeopathic treatments or practitioners.
“Evolution” – none of the results promoted creationalism or intelligent design however all 4 of the sponsored links pointed to a pro-creationalism website.
“9/11” – 1 out of 10 search results promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories. Not including the one Wiki article about conspiracy theories. Only 1 of the sponsored links lead to a conspiracy website.
Obviously this list is by no means comprehensive and clearly bias towards issues that I consider relevant or interesting. It is clear from these initial searches that the situation is far better than it was in 2002 but there are still large concerns over the material being promoted on Google. Particularly in the area of sponsored links, this should not be undermined as uncontrollable or irrelevent, how would you feel if an advert for Creationalism came up in the middle of watching an animal documentary? It is also worrying the amount of material there is promoting quackery. If you were ill informed and wanted to search on google for information about Homeopathic remedies you would do well to sieve through the majority of bunk to find the good advice.
I would mirror Martin, the editor of Lay Science’s, comments on this; this it raises interesting ethical questions about the role of search engines. If you are likely to see homeopathic remedies promoted on Google then “what responsibility – if any – do Google (motto: “Do No Evil”) have for the public health consequences”.
7 Responses to “Googlekook”
Endless psych wrote on December 1st, 2009 4:33 pm :
I blogged about this ages ago also:-
http://andyourelectronmicroscope.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/what-does-the-internet-think-about-scam/
Adrian Bailey wrote on December 1st, 2009 8:13 pm :
I think you’re being unfair on Google if you think it shouldn’t list homeopathy websites first, when someone’s searched for homeopathy!
Peter wrote on December 11th, 2009 3:57 pm :
I wanted to find out how many people actually search for the keywords you discussed in this post so I used the very useful google adwords tool to find out (link below). Heres the results:
Vaccination
Global: 673,000
UK: 246,000
Climate Change
Global: 1,000,000
UK: 450,000
Moon landing
Global: 201,000
UK: 74,000
Moon landing conspiracy
Global: 14,800
UK: 6,600
Swine Flu Treatment
Global: 12,100
UK: Not enough data
Homeopathy
Global: 550,000
UK: 110,000
Evolution
Global: 13,600,000
UK: 4,090,000
Creationism
Global: 201,000
UK: 22,000
9 11 2001
Global: 22,200
UK: 1,300
conspiracy 9 11
Global: 135,000
UK: 18,100
Google adwords tool:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
To understand why websites a
Peter wrote on December 11th, 2009 3:57 pm :
Interesting post, however as an experienced website designer/builder I think I should put my two cents in here.
You have to realise that the links that appear when you search for something on Google are the result of an incredibly sophisticated and complex, unbiased system of finding sites relating to the keywords you type in. The rankings relate to the keywords on a web page, at no point does Google filter its results according to the opinion or philosophy the website is promoting, whatever that may be.
Any website has the ability to be optimised for any keyword, and there are hundreds of factors which need to be taken into account when optimising a website correctly. (see below for factors that influence search engine rankings).
As far as the sponsored advertising goes Google has no direct influence here either. The sponsored links at the top either come from a pay per click system or a lot of the time sponsorship can be arranged through your Internet Service Provider. Sponsored links are often seen as a cheap alternative to getting an SEO company to optimise your website properly.
Factors that influence your Google rankings:
1. Good domain name. Having keywords relating to the content of your site in the actual name of the website can help your rankings massively.
1. Organic optimisation of your site (100′s of factors relating to how the website is built, ‘alt’ , ‘title’ tags on images and headers relating to content, accessibility of site for hearing or sight impaired)
2. Your page title tags must relate directly to the content on your site (the page titles of websites also appear as the main link to a site when searching on Google)
3. Low percentage of bounces (i.e. people who click on your link from Google and immediately click back to Google because your site was irrelevant to the keyword you searched for)
4. A mixed range of inbound links from other websites relating to your content. Indeed, putting a link to my essex based web design company here will help its optimisation.
5. Google ‘trust’ rankings
Google also has a complex ‘trust’ system where websites usually for large brands and organisations are given a high ‘trust’ ranking. If you gain a link directly from a highly ‘trusted’ website it boosts your trust ranking and in turn your google ranking.
uksceptic wrote on December 11th, 2009 9:49 pm :
Thanks for your comments Peter, I did have a fairly decent understanding of how google produces its results although not nearly as comprehensive as you have outlined.
If you read through my post and the original paper I referred to you will see that the issue is not how google produces its results but whether it has an ethical responcibility for the results it gives out. That the results are created in an unbias way does not mean that the results themselves are irresponcible. Perhaps you might not think so but I still think it is something worth thinking about especially when google has such a stranglehold on the search engine industry.
Speaking of your essex based web design company, have you put a link to my blog on there yet!?
Why not use http://www.whatdoestheinternetthink.net ?
Vaccination has apparently apparently 86.8% positive results
Climate change – 53.1% positive
Evolution – 84.6% positive