Will Google make science obsolete?

I don't think so, neither do the folks over at Ars:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-why-the-cloud-cannot-obscure-the-scientific-method.html

<cringe> I would have to say no. Google is a wonderful and powerful search engine but it is still only as good as the data it allows users to find, and boy what a vast quantity there is!

As an example look at the vast quantity of realistic and professional-looking websites full of pictures and data on such things as "free energy", "perpetual motion", water-driven cars", etc. The average person now has so much access to data, but still lacks the basic knowledge to distinguish between real science, pseudoscience, a scam, or bald-faced lies and paranoid delusion. Can we blame web surfers for continuously touting this and that "free energy" developments that they see videos of on the web and telling we engineers and scientists that we should have fixed the worlds problems years ago, or worse still using these ideas to create their own over-unity device to save the world (and/or make lots of money).

The media is also to blame. A single news release on, say a water-powered car is picked up and regurgitated verbatim across hundreds of websites. If you do a search it looks like hundreds of sources are reporting on the same thing giving the news item a "verified" look to something a single source has reported. The single source could be wrong or it could be a hoax, you can imagine what would happen if this data was used believing that it was valid just because so many sources printed the same thing.

Now more than ever careful dissemination and verification of data is required as any yahoo can create a professional website, make up false qualifications and post realistic (but worthless) data.

Hmm, this post seems to imply that gather a large set of statistical data, processing it, and generating a mathematical model that appears to fit the statistical data is not science. However, I would suspect that all biological and sociological "sciences" would take a different view, since this is the method they have traditionally used to develop most of their theories. What i think the implication is that google has made more people utilkize the biological/sociological method of Science, rather then the physical scineces method.

No, just simply saying (among other things) that the results are only as good as the data used, "Garbage in, Garbage out".

What ever is the analysis tool, good data verification is important.

This seemingly serious site is in fact a Hoax put out to incite using judgement on what you see on the internet: http://www.dhmo.org/

It is a rather serious site after all, as the process of using judgement in knowledge acquisition is often lacking both on and off the internet.

And this is a very serious problem.

Google accelerates and democratizes knowledge retrieval, the rest has to be done by us, DHMO tainted beings, before it is too late. (Sleep is important)

Hello julie

The algorithms that Google uses, show the most visited via Google Search engine, in the order of the number of times that Webpage is visited.

Thus a Webpage with many words on it, added so that Internet Search Engines "webcrawler spiders" will locate that Webpage, stand a far better chance of "Making it into the top ten webpages" of a Search.

For example, there are Webpages which include all the contents of the dictionary, solely to fool a webcrawler spider, who lists each word as being equally important.

Thus one may type into a Search engine: Wheelbarrow, and end up on a p*rn*graphic page, because of the way that webpage designer knows how the webcrawlers work.

It is a constant battle between webpage coders, and the designers and modifiers of Internet Search Engines, to defeat those "unfair" code writers.

There are Webpages which do not allow Webcrawlers to visit, or copy. Some of these have valuable information on them, or the research of years, and the Search Engine is consequently unable to share that information with the casual searcher.

As it stands today, Google is the most powerful Internet Search Engine, but has access to less than 60% of available webpages.

Internet Search Engines usage is like asking a helpful Librarian, who can direct you to an area of your interest in the Library, but the Librarian cannot see all the books, because some books have no titles, or are locked away, thus they cannot be catalogued, and if they are not catalogued, for the Librarian, thosee books do not exist.

There is a further problem with webpages: The information therein can be changed or vanish, without your knowledge - similar to a book having pages ripped out, or lost.

As for me, I do much research via the Internet, and temper that located web-information with my own experiential knowledge, and printed Textbooks as necessary.

Kind Regards....

Sorry. It ain't just the data.

Knowledge is when we have understanding of information which is data in context.

Correlations of hemlines, stock indexes and sunspots are made, but do not inform.

With out an hypothesis to provide context, its just a very elaborate crap shoot.

BTW, I have used corellations in my problem solving professionally, but without a underlying model of what the correlation is pointing to as a mechanism, its just magick.

milo

Hello Milo

<"....Correlations of hemlines, stock indexes and sunspots are made, but do not inform....">

These may actually inform: Sunspots cause greater heating of the planet we live on, thus hemlines go up, so the ladies can be cooler, this causes Stock Indices for clothing makers to go up, because now they can make millions of new miniskirts, after encouraging the fashion pundits, that "the miniskirt is the new fashion".

Just to assist you in the matter

Kind Regards....

Brilliant!

milo

It is not just the quality of the data, it is the quality of the question. People can search Google for the things they know they don't know, but it is the Rumsfeld questions that matter.

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld.

If you don't know it is a question, nobody asks it. Scientists, inventors, CR4 weirdo's ask the unknown unknowns and because they are unknown, you are back at science.

Simon

Sweet!

milo

I think there are some confusion on terms. Computers (petabytes) can help science by making complex calculations in short time, search for correlations or compare results when changing variables thus helping optimizing a process, among some other things.

Google is one of the available tools to search information through the web. But you need to discriminate if the information is right or not, it seems credible? absurd? logic?(not all the information available is true) and after that you must be able to "understand" that information, for which you need to have a basic education. (scientific one?)

My thesis to get the MSc, I cannot remember when it was, was a FORTRAN IV computer program to design absorption towers to get phosphoric acid in an old (most advanced then) IBM 7090 with punched cards. It was a hard work testing each and every subroutine against hand made calculations to be sure that the program run well.

I can make a Google search for neuro-surgery, but I don't think I would become a surgeon just reading the searching results!!!

Having access to lots of data doesn't mean you do not have to test the model

No, never as long as we have people who can think and are inquisitive.

Spencer.