lemon garden

I am increasingly of the opinion that Wikipedia has rather undermined Google’s usefulness as a search engine.

Once upon a time, you could rely upon Google to have the most relevant and useful results appear right at the very top of your search results. I can remember the feeling of astonishment when I first discovered Google (in about 1999, I think) after having wasted so much time struggling to sort the wheat from the chaff in Altavista or Yahoo’s results. Here was a search engine that actually found what you were looking for. It was a revelation.

Now, it is not so revealing. For example, in my quest to better understand particle physics (and who doesn’t want to do that?) I search for “bottom quark“. The first result is a wikipedia article about quarks. But particle physics is a complex subject, so I’d expect the best sites to find out about quarks would be run by the physics department of a university, or similar.

Any website that’s run by an actual particle physicist is rather further down the list. In fact, looking down the list of results, it’s difficult to pick out the relevant sites from the noise. It’s like the bad old days of search engines.

In fact, I don’t find a decent link about quarks until I reach page two of the search results - a site run by Manchester University’s High Energy Particle Physics Group.

Now I want to pursue my interest in astronomy, but I’m a bit hazy on all these different astronomical phenomena. So I search for “quasar“. Guess what the first search result is - yes, a wikipedia entry. The first decent page about quasars isn’t found until page three of the results.

Here we have a page created by the astrophysics department of a university. That is, by people we can be reasonably sure know their stuff when it comes to quasars. Plus, as the site was created by people running a course on astrophysics, there’s a lot of other good stuff there about astronomy.

I can’t help but think that the people of wikipedia have rather missed the point of the world wide web. They’ve created an encyclopedia on the web. But the web is rather like an encyclopedia itself. Save that it is one where you can actually go to source to find out about something.

Want to know about particle accelerators? Well, thanks to the internet, you can go to CERN’s own website and read about their own particle accelerators! That’s the glory of the internet.

But then I wonder I wonder if this is a problem that just affects searches of a scientific bent. Can I think of a search that is as far from reason and science as humanly possible? Ah, yes. Paris Whitney Hilton. Bugger.