For years we believed that Doctor Google would bring us the information we need.  Tom Krazit at Gigom suggests that the party may be over.  Search has become so algorithmically corrupt that its hard to understand or believe what we’re getting.

The thing that gets me is that we’ve become such informed consumers in so many other areas of our lives. We buy organic vegetables, we obsess over miles-per-gallon in our prospective cars, and we demand that our artificially valuable gems weren’t touched by desperate violent gangs before they reach our fingers. Yet we assume that the information being presented to us by the content aggregators of our day is the information we really need to see.

Eli Pariser had it right in The Filter Bubble:

“Personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

Funny that in the early days we blindly told patients that the search engines were full of nonsense.  Maybe we were right.