Daniel M. Russell

“there’s a lot of not-so-great scholarship out there, even in books and what seems like primary sources. In particular, there’s a lot of repetition of
errors that were introduced early on and somehow never corrected. (That’s what I mean by poor scholarship. Just repeating something that you found on the internet doesn’t make it right; it merely makes it repetitious. And if you didn’t double check it in the first place, you’re earning yourself a particularly nasty place in hell”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics

“The increasing sophistication in representing world knowledge online also implies that asking the right questions will become more of a skill. A common error made among beginning searchers is to pose queries that have a built-in bias, a kind of leading question. A question that “leads the witness” wouldn’t be allowed in a courtroom and shouldn’t be in your research queries either. This is fairly common among K–12 students who don’t yet understand the basics of web search and often frame their questions with built-in assumptions. In cases like this, you need to know that the results are ordered by rank depending on the terms in the query.

Take the following query:
[is the average length of an octopus 25 inches?]
It will give web links in the search results page that look right, but there’s an assumption within the query—that is, that octopuses actually are, on average, 25 inches in length. The web search results will be a bit misleading because there are so many positive hits that mention the terms “octopus” and “25 inches” on the same page. In this case, the search engine doesn’t really understand the question, but gives pages that best match the query, with its biases built in.”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics