The Black Hole and the Harbor Seal
If we are researching about a topic is because we are seeking to get more knowledge about it. It does not matter if we are already considered experts about a subject. There will be something you are willing to know about.
Normally people search on Google about it. Then you receive millions of results in milliseconds and yes, that is information that at certain point can be relevant to what are you looking for.
But do you all know how the search is done? Let’s get shortly into it.
Google follows 3 steps to bring you the results of your query.
Crawling
Google search constantly for new pages to a list of known pages. The discovery process has different entry points. It can be by following a link from a link in a known page. A website owner can also submit pages to be discovered.
If you have recently made changes to your site, you can request a (re)index by submitting a sitemap of your site or by using the URL inspection tool.
So, Google knows things. And trillions of links.
Indexing
When a page is already crawled Google, as knower of things, try to understand what it is about. Basically all the information in your website is saved on databases.
After having that massive amount of information it is time to sort it.
-I’m trying to know how do you get to valuable information while you research. Doing this is only a very first step to help doing better while researching. Get me there !!!
Serving and Ranking
On this step, Google searches for the best answers (even when it knows already a lot of things) based on factors like your location, device, previous searches and many others.
In the other hand is SEO, the ones who know all this search mechanisms to optimize your site to serve your users’ needs. Having a good SEO will boost your presence in Google searches. No doubt.
There are several ways to influence all that, and there are black hat SEOs, and a whole universe or rankings and big minds behind.
So the quality and reliability of the content is adjusted following many parameters but you. Where is the human touch?
The Harbor Seal and the Black Hole
That is nothing else that the same topic presented on We Know Nothing. We are getting information that others repeated after others repeated and so on until there is the first who said it.
When we are talking about knowledge (I meant when one knows most of the answers) it converts you on an expert before all the society. But if the number of questions to experts people ask decreases (as it certainly does because there is Google, and Google knows things) how are we trying to learn something deeply?
If we are becoming experts faster, the amount of personalized answers will be less. And we all will be lame.
We are not trying to learn. We are trying to get informed superficially and pretend that we know. Period.
Do you remember those old times (with no internet of course) when in your school you had the chance to ask your teacher all the questions? Or when you read a book and you found at the end all the references and then you moved to the next in the list and so on? It was cool wasn’t it?
You knew those articles or books were read by the one who wrote the piece you completed. The author was looking into the article or book you read.
Nowadays we have authors writing these kind of articles. Like “10 Best websites about becoming a better writer” or “Best 10 articles about the environment of the harbor seal”. It is easy, go to the wildness of Google’s crawled, indexed, ranked and served black hole of links and content. Then write an article.
Wikipedia (e.g) does something else. Sort of. But there are many biasses and ways to get distracted on Wikipedia. Sometimes you search about the harbor seal (by the way, I don’t know if the one in the picture is one of them) and you end reading about the singularity on a black hole.
The hierarchical flow of information makes nothing else that turn us in a world that repeats what other said. So does Google too.
The best we can do to start consuming better information is to rank ourselves what is valuable and what is junk. Doing this is only a very first step to help doing better while researching. Get me there !!!
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