Journalists Using Google As Their Source On Popularity
from the maybe-good,-maybe-bad... dept
People like numbers. Numbers give them something concrete when discussing ideas that may not be concrete at all. Thus, it's no surprise to see people gravitate to any sort of system that gives them a numerical value that they can use to prove a point - and the most popular method these days seems to be doing a Google search and looking at the number of results. That's the whole point behind Googlefight, after all. However, someone has noticed that lazy journalists are often using Google result counts as the final arbiter on popularity - and doing no additional research. Jeremy Wagstaff points out that, like many other things, such tools have good uses and bad uses. While many journalists are clearly using this because they're lazy, that doesn't mean all uses of the technique are bad. Full disclosure: I did use the Google results count technique in a presentation I gave at an O'Reilly conference a few years back, but at least I admitted that it was totally unscientific.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Lawyers too
[ link to this | view in thread ]