Finding Info by Googling

Google is the number one search engine in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Google now provides an interface for 120 languages and offers results in 35 languages. Remarkably, more than 50% of Google traffic is from outside the U.S.

So... how easily can you be found, on Google.com?

Wikipedia's Contorted Entries

The Herald Tribune reports that "Last year, someone edited the Wikipedia entry for the Sea World theme parks to change all mentions of orcas to killer whales, insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species... There was another, unexplained edit: A paragraph about criticism of Sea World's "lack of respect toward its orcas" disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, Sea World's owner."

"Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, Virgil Griffith, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor's network."

...So, read what you will on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt.

Check out the Story

Before you relay potentially bogus information to others, check out the story on your own:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/
http://www.quackwatch.org/
http://www.straightdope.com/

http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/
http://www.skeptic.com/

Unscientific Americans

From a National Science Foundation's biennial report on the state of science understanding, research, and education, of 1,574 adults surveyed:

* 54% knew long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. In other words, 46% did not know.
* 51% knew that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses.
* 48% knew that the earliest humans didn't live at the same time as the dinosaurs. So, an astounding 52% did not know.

What kind of information are Americans likely to know? The name of Tom Cruise’s baby and who Brad Pitt was married to before Angelina Joli… makes me weep for the state of our collective intelligence.

How Much New Info Annually?

“How much new information is created each year?” Researchers at Berkeley University say that “Newly created information is stored in four physical media: print, film, magnetic and optical, and seen or heard in four information flows through electronic channels, telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet.” The executive summary is provided at http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm