• NVI Blog, Friday, October 3, 2008 2:49 PM

Simon Abramovitch takes a rant and turns it into a lesson in perception, arguing that mainstream media writers don't really "get" search. The article that sparked his diatribe was from Newsweek, and the topic was marriage -- or rather infidelity -- and the author cited Google search results in the first sentence.

Google the words "marriage and affair" and you get more than 17 million variations on how to heal. That's because "fidelity in marriage"-which only gets about 3½ million hits-is a hard thing to come by these days." 

"Reading those opening lines, I cringed, took a sip of sweet, creamy chai, and fired up Wordpress," Abramovitch says. His main issue is that the author took the search results at face value, without understanding the system behind how results get ranked. The author used quotes, for example, which Abramovitch says skews results to only the exact phrase. In another example, a sports writer, compiled a list of the most popular athletes -- simply by choosing the top six that showed up during a Google search. "Athletes who popped up for relationships with celebrities, crimes committed, and other unrelated results would have been caught under this interpretive umbrella," he says.

Ultimately, Abramovitch says that examples like these illustrate a real lack of understanding of the nuts and bolts of search by mainstream media. And while every writer need not "get" the nuances of algorithms, it's important for editors and publishers to not make correlations between search result popularity and everyday life. "Publications whose authors and editors submit these errors would be wise to shape up before the majority of the populace catches on," he says. "Large results totals on searches not in quotations do not serve as an indicator of anything quantitatively relevant about human beings."

Read the whole story at NVI Blog »