27/05/2015

What Really Happened to the Search Results?

I noticed this tweet along with a number of blog posts about the same topic. And there are many more pages like that, from the Internet atheism/skeptic brigade, protecting the world from Christianity gone mad.

What has happened is that using Google to search for the phrase what happened to the dinosaurs triggered a match on a book with a similar title: What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs by Ken Ham. His crime is to be a creationist. Can you believe it? Those sneaky Christians have gone and adjusted Google's search algorithm, so that when you search for the title of a book, you get back a bunch of information about the book. Think of the children!


Oh, wait. No. There's definitely a lack of critical thinking going on here somewhere, though. What's worse is all the oh-so-clever geniuses leaving 'feedback' about this, explaing how the result is incorrect because science! and similar. They semm to also have failed to notice this response to their submissions: Note: Your feedback won't directly influence the ranking of any single page. Probably because they are gleefully posting about how they have 'corrected' Google. They also appear to believe that despite this, the invisible hand of Google has listened to them, and removed the ofensive result, rather than what has actually happened - all the recent posts about the 'controversy' are weighted higher by the search algorithm, because they are more recent pages...

Grrr. If there's one thing I hate it's idiots like this who believe they are more intelligent that they are (see also Dunning-Kruger effect) and are blessed with super-rational skepticism that makes them infallibly right, unlike those poor benighted religionists. There's a time and a place for making fun of people who support flimsy beliefs with pretend science, and this is not it.