Blogs and Research
Steven Taylor has been grading term papers and finds that students are suddenly citing blogs quite a lot.
[W]hat this actually reflects are the poor research skills of students who think that putting keywords into Google equates to research. It further demonstrates that they lack the skills needed to discern whether what they have found is news, opinion or scholarly analysis.
More evidence that Google is the new “research” tool: another student made wide use of Wikipedia.
Back to blogs: what this further demonstrates is the prevalence of blogs in search engine results. We are everywhere.
Yep. Indeed, after being nearly invisible to Google for months, OTB is suddenly coming up ridiculously high in searches for everyday news items. Looking through my SiteMeter referral logs, I see that I’m:
- #1 on Yahoo for “bad treated iraqi prisoners”
- #7 on MSN for “4th Amendment”
- #5 and #6 on Google for +Pappas +”Abu Ghraib”
- #16 on Dogpile for “hoax or truth iraq pictures of torture”
- #6 and #6a on Google for “Charles A. Graner” gay [WTF? -ed. Don’t ask, don’t tell.]
- #6 on MSN for janis karpinski
That’s not cherry picking–they’re the six most recent search engine referrals.
