has just become available to users in the United States. It should become available in other countries soon. I was immediately curious how this new technology would affect searches for topics relevant to skepticism.The most obvious component of the new product is a panel that appears to the right of many search results (in place of the ads). This box contains results derived from Wikipedia and other sources, and is intended as a quick answer to your search. It often contains a list of three to five related searches. If you search for a person, the related searches will be other people.
I was not surprised to find that searches for many popular skeptics including D.J. Grothe, Joe Nickell, Phil Plait and Michael Shermer show James Randi as a related search. This is just what one would expect.
But then I started searching for our cultural competitors - psychics, fakers and charlatans and the like - and I found something interesting. See one such sample result below.
Someone searching for British psychic Sally Morgan (aka "Psychic Sally") is presented with several skeptical alternate searches, including Simon Singh and James Randi! Nothing related to Randi would have appeared in the results before this change.
In fact, U.S. searchers who enter any of the following search terms will be greeted with James Randi's visage staring out at them:
- Rosemary Altea
- Sylvia Browne
- John Edward
- Uri Geller
- James Hydrick
- Peter Popoff
I must say this is a fine enhancement Google has made. Anyone searching for information about these people could do well learning about Randi's work instead.
I imagine there are many charlatans angrily clicking that "Report a problem" button right now. One hopes that fine folks at Google will ignore them.
If you'd like to learn more about these results, and how the work of grassroots skeptic helped create them, I blogged further details at Skeptools as well.
Tim Farley is a JREF Research Fellow. He is the creator of the website What's the Harm and blogs at Skeptical Software Tools. He has presented at three TAMs and will present a workshop on Crowdsourced Skepticism at TAM 2012 in July. You can follow him on Twitter here.