The days of Google are crippling true news research.

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

In the last few weeks of trying to conduct simple online research for a few discussions on the forums I have encountered some hard and disappointing facts.

If you simply type in a question without very specific Boolean expressions to qualify the request, you do not get the most relevant answers at all. You only get the ones that have achieved the most hits. With this in mind it is real easy to see where a younger less experienced researcher would simply fall into a relatively well laid out, but totally fabricated site professing to be based on facts. All a group needs to do to make thier point of view (right or wrong) stand out at the top of a search list is visit it en mass untill it hits the top of the search pile than by default many will visit the site simply because it is at the top of the massive number of pages in the information muck.

I don't know how many bad citations I have come across, when simply grabbing details I already knew the answers to for a few posts. I even had a guy on another forum tell me it was the top of the search pile so it had to be more accurate. Has any one else experienced this type of deception before?

[Willy]

I also think that the top sites pay a fee to be put there.

[masonco]

RJE

 

Think no longer...It is true that the first sites on the page pay to be there. The ones in that beige color pay for top page privileges.

 

Then the others are sorted by relevancy to what you typed according to search criteria.

[XLFD]

I read about this a while back when researching why certain threads of ours and Ludington Talks would show up high on a Google search, while others would not. 

It's all about search engine optimization, an intriguing aspect of looking for things on the web, and most of those places you probably are getting sent to on your first page that are not good matches for you are using 'black hat' techniques to get hits.  Spiders, indexing, white and black hats-- here's a synopsis of that on wikipedia I found interesting:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization