The Fine art of Googlometry
Published on www.crikey.com.au May 19th, 2006 In the pages of Crikey, Google seems to be morphing from a search engine which finds information into a pseudo-scientific survey tool. It's being used as a measure of the importance, popularity and cultural significance of various phenomena. Such misuse is no doubt tempting as Google is free, instantaneous and its sheer ubiquity gives it a certain superficial authority. But it's misleading to use Google in this way, and it's certainly no substitute for statistical analysis. In the recent past Crikey has published a number of articles in which the author uses the number of hits in Google to somehow substantiate his case. On April 27, Crikey published this sentence. “If you type the words ‘military incompetence' into Google, you'll find 46,500 entries.” If you type in the phrase today you get 36,700 hits. That doesn't mean that militaries world wide have become more competent. Also if you Google "military victory