via inc:
Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
You do it all the time, don’t you?
You’re at a restaurant, in a bar, on a train or merely prostrate on the sofa when a question comes up.
Your first instinct is to Google it.
You feel sure that you’ll find the answer straight away and feel much, much more intelligent within seconds.
But do you ever stop to think that what you see when you Google something may not be, well, true?
Google seems to think you should.
A fascinating CNBC interview with the company’s relatively new search liaison, Danny Sullivan, laid bare some of painful myths associated with Googling everything.
Sullivan explained that part of his job is to explain that Google isn’t some infallible oracle, but, instead, that its algorithms sometimes dance an ungainly samba.
Indeed, he explained the heart of Google search very simply: “We’re not a truth engine.”
Yet so many people think it is. So many have abdicated their own sense of judgment in favor of the ease of pressing a few buttons to get the answer.
Google doesn’t offer you the truth. It doesn’t even claim to offer you the truth.
What, then, is it?
Sullivan explained that one of the bigger debates within the company is how to wean the uncritical, lazy slobs that humans have become into using their brains again.
Naturally, he didn’t quite phrase it that way.
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