To start with, all the candidates for the presidency of the United States of America seem to have more weaknesses then strengths this year. The race has become a situation of choosing the lesser evil depending on your point of view. I will strive to point out silliness on both sides of the campaign but today's silliness is something that is apolitical, it is silliness based on granting way too much power to "the google".
'The Road We've Traveled' With Obama by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal today uses a statistic that drives me crazy, a statistic that pundits and lazy reporters use to show that their subject is interesting or that their argument is sound. The statistic is how many hits a search term will have when used in a google search. Here is the example that got me fired up today:
"If you Google "Obama, Blame, Bush" and "Obama, Inherited," you'll get tens of millions of hits."
My first point is, who the hell cares! We all know and have known for sometime that once you get past the first ten results of a google search result set the rest is usually just meaningless drivel. Who in their right mind is going to go to result 10,938,122?
Second point, search terms used as key words and not phrases will yield results regardless of the order. So that a fictitious article title "Blame Obama not Bush" would show up. It gets even worse if the "or" operator is used. For example, imagine that many of the results mentioned had just the word Obama in them and not blame or Bush. President Obama is after all, the leader of the dominant power on the Earth right now, if the internet has any viability as a news and information source there should be lots of results when you search his name. To further make my point, I will speculate many results had just Bush in them but I did not check them for fear of ending up on a Estonian porn site(no link here for many reasons) and having my identity stolen. The search hits are really meaningless without knowing how the search is put together.
My next point is that content is syndicated on the internet, many sites have identical articles and many crappy little blogs (hopefully not this one) have content that is pasted into them. So how many of these results are redundant? I am not sure, but some enterprising media graduate student could have a very good thesis on this topic.
Finally, I searched on the word "the", I got "about" 25,270,000,000 results. That means that the work "the" must be very important in some context, very similar to "42 is the answer, now what is the question". 'nuff said.
The better measure, especially in the context of campaigning, would be to find out how many searches are occurring. That data can come from a tool like google trends.
