The Stupidity of Google Search

Google Search dominates the Internet search market.  One would think that having achieved that domination and given the importance of that market, that it would have strived hard to become a smart search tool.  It has proven slothful in that regard.

My materials analysis laboratory offers about 110 pages of scientific and technical information about materials, their properties, how to determine their properties, and about how knowledge of those properties has real utility for manufacturers and the users of materials.  I and my Ph.D. scientists wrote those pages targeting them at our principal customers, who are scientists and engineers in most cases.  For this, Google Search penalized us because scientific, technical, and even our general English usage was not gauged toward 3rd grade readers.  We are presently re-writing the principal landing pages to dumb them down to Google Search’s desired level.  For the most part, one can go from those pages to the pages written for intelligent, scientifically-minded individuals, but this requires more patience from our customers.

Google Search may to some degree make judgments of what subjects are of interest to a given searcher, but it is not intelligent enough to match the intelligence level of websites with the intelligence of the searcher.  If it knew that a searcher was interested in science and technology, it might reasonably assume that the searcher was intelligent and most likely was not a 3rd grader.  Yet given a list of websites that match the searchers search phrase, Google will always prefer sending this person to the website with the best 3rd grade readability score.  This is not very bright.

Google also does not evaluate the whole of the website.  It is just as happy sending someone to a skimpy 5-page website as to a 110-page website for information on materials analysis.

There certainly are websites that should be written at the 3rd grade level.  I do not begrudge people of average intelligence or less the use of the Internet.  However, there are also sites that should be written for college graduates and even for those well-versed in science and technology.  An excellent search engine should have optimizations that recognize how to match the intellectual level of a website with that of the searcher.  In fact, the searcher ought to have the means to tell the search engine what intellectual level the searcher wants to operate at.  This would also serve the individual who may be striving to raise his intellectual level in a particular area above what his past history might indicate it was.  It would also acknowledge the fact that individuals might operate at different intellectual levels with respect to different subjects.  For instance, I am more comfortable with the terms of physics and materials science than I am with medical terminology.

In this, I am not just complaining about the requirement to dumb-down my own scientific website.  I often find that the websites I am sent to by search engines as the “best” are really very dumb.  Search engine results are often very disappointing.  When Internet developers are called “High Technology,” I find it rather obscene.  The search engines are seeking the lowest common denominator.  It is past time for them to be doing more than that.