Saying "google is not science" is like saying "spotify isn't music."
Yeah if you just go on there and do a mostly undirected mosey through whatever it suggests, you'll probably end up with low quality nonsense. The answer is to become better at using the tool.
It's problematic to not distinguish between things you know and thing you just googled, regardless of which is more accurate.
The problem is similar to not looking and determining what the information of the article you Google is. This feeds into the now stereotype behavior of someone confusing a Google search with actual research. Google doesn't help with it's question-answer section, many of which are mis-categorized and from not-necessarily reliable sources.
Quantity has a quality all it's own.
A large quantity of poor quality of information is certainly not something that it would be useful to have automatically pouring through one's cranium, to say the least.
Google is a tool
like a knife. If you don't know how to use it, you can cut yourself.
In a world, there children can't avoid knifes, children should be thought how to use them safely.
Google returning nonsense results can be exploited as a teachable moment. That is why non-practical questions such as the one about gravity and atmosphere are useful, they encourage developing more widely applicable skills (healthy skepticism) while stakes are low.
As a response to the GP, You're making this much too hard. Google's results have become the crap they describes fairly recently - in the last two years, with a specific and noticeable change (and good stuff is even still there if one works hard and the crappiness might have receded a bit lately, even).
Sure, one also needs understanding to get something out of search. But Google when was in it's sweet-spot, it could get a researcher extra knowledge and insight. After all, a researcher needs both a holistic perspective and information they'd know at the start of an exploration.
If anything google made all types of bullshit more accessible.
Just search for articles about: Non-stick pans, chem-trails, hollow-earth theory, etc. etc.
While I appreciate the author's work, I suggest ditching Google Search altogether in favor of DuckDuckGo or anything else. At this point I only use Google when I need to buy something, as Google has become an expert in finding products tailored to my needs (but not in checking knowledge/facts - my go to here is ChatGPT/Wikipedia)
So you're confused why other people aren't doing research for you and when they do provide some evidence, you dismiss it because it's not a large-scale scientific inquiry into search quality? Get frickin a grip.
That's not the user acting as though it's a dodgy site, that's the user acting "learning is hard! let's go to youtube".
If you are actually doing research on some subject and are actually prepared to read and obtain new knowledge then yes, your cursory first look is going to be about the content and sources/references, and if you're still going to bounce on the looks then either you're not really trying or you are still just looking for a simpler bite sized easy answer (which pretty much do not exist in this field of science).
By that logic, Google could penalize every site that has in-depth knowledge about some subject.
And now that I think about it, these are EXACTLY the kinds of websites I've been missing from the Google search results in the past years. Most people first stop for "in-depth" knowledge would be Wikipedia (try defending THAT one, 6 years ago ...) and if you really want to, maybe that PDF of a publication is not behind a paywall. The web used to be full of pages that just were made by people crazy smart about a subject and they wrote about the thing they love ...
Just for illustration, I went through my old bookmarks, the original link was dead but the page still exists: http://gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/index.html Just browse a few pages and see what a quality site it is. It even has each page in both Germand and English.
This page used to pop up all the time when you searched for spices way back in the first half of the 2000s. Try googling "fenugreek" now and cry ...
And the majority of this quality content is not even ad supported at all. That is the worst part. So many people seriously argue that you need ads to support the internet. Well, THIS is the internet that I want, the good one, the promised internet. And look at that "fenugreek" search result page again, it's being fucking buried by this shitty ad supported internet of hollow articles about "fenugreek health benefits". THAT is the internet you get, you support by supporting ads. For every starving quality journalist at the news websites that argue they have to serve you megabytes of adtech with a two paragraph article, there are a thousand regurgitated content farm bullshit sites, easily consuming the vast majority of this internet advertising pie ... it's like cheering on mass murder because the obituaries make such nice haikus some times.
The sentiments on the last page is how I felt upon reading this rant.
The author seems to hate Google specifically because they don't know how to find good information. Perhaps the author is so easily distracted that they spend too much time on Google and not enough time on authoritative sources in the first place (which usually can be found with Google).
For example, if I wanted to know about a NASA mission, I can go to their site directly and read far more information about that information than any library would have available (except, unironically, on the computers they let you use for this very purpose). Why would I go to Google first when I know the most authoritative source for info on a NASA mission is NASA's website dedicated to it? Probably to find a link to that authoritative source of actual information.
Search engines have their place. Your inability to craft good search criteria, or differentiate good results from bad, doesn't invalidate the wealth of information out there. And Google does make it easy to find. But you have to actually use some of your own intelligence to know what authoritative information looks like.
A website that is pretty much a drive-it-yourself worse-than-PowerPoint slide show that is highly reminiscent of a clickbait ad bomb is a perfect example of the rubbish that is out there, though. And I doubt it would show up in any of my Google searches.
"Google knows better than you" gives way too much credit IMHO. Google Search is nearly useless for my most searched topics today, and even dangerous in that it gives you a very wrong perception of what is out there.
Another option would be to get more scientific knowledge online. When I log into my local library with my library card and do a JSTOR search, the difference between those results and what Google hands back are night and day.
"The Internet" returns the cheap, fast and crappy version of so, so many things. And people seem oblivious to it.
Yeah I had to stop using Google entirely because I just couldn't find anything relevant to what I actually wanted to know. They've worked so hard to make the results relevant to someone with like 1 year of experience that the results are no longer actually relevant to someone who wants to go deeper or know more or who already knows everything on the first page of results but needs more information than a magic library.
To be honest the Internet has gotten significantly less useful as a repository of information as it has aged, to the point where I now have to order books if I want to learn anything new in my field.
> society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer
Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to most searches just to find semi-relevant content.
But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.
Yeah if you just go on there and do a mostly undirected mosey through whatever it suggests, you'll probably end up with low quality nonsense. The answer is to become better at using the tool.
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