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An interesting article on how Google's search results can be manipulated from the Feb 13, 2011 NY Times Business section. Is our search engine research being manipulated in other ways as well?

I posted the brief which has links to the original Google study and Nicholas Carr's underwhelmed response because the summary is nice and easy to digest plus if you wish to delve further you can. Basically Google challenged students in a library versus those using Google to answer 'random' questions- Nicholas Carr responds- " How did the University of Michigan researchers come up with the questions that they had their subjects find answers to? They "obtained a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine." Ha! Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality? That question might actually propel one into the musty depths of a library, where "time saved" is not always the primary concern".