Skew that pimple, searcher
John Markoff wrote about Microsoft researchers that published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines. One of the researchers, Horvitz, an artificial intelligence expert at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert.
The boffins found Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare. Horvitz likened this to “medical schoolitis” – where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You’ve read so much about disease that you are sure you have it.
A wonder here: if Web searchers have a tendency to jump to awful conclusions, doesn’t that skew Google results? Is the Google brain likely to evolve and become similarly demented as the stock market in heat? "Peoples is my business" was a bit of old vaudeville.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/technology/internet/25symptoms.html
The boffins found Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare. Horvitz likened this to “medical schoolitis” – where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You’ve read so much about disease that you are sure you have it.
A wonder here: if Web searchers have a tendency to jump to awful conclusions, doesn’t that skew Google results? Is the Google brain likely to evolve and become similarly demented as the stock market in heat? "Peoples is my business" was a bit of old vaudeville.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/technology/internet/25symptoms.html
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