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MediLexicon Search - Search the Web, Wikipedia, Dictionary and More medilexicon.com | Search seven million books via Google Book Search - Library News - UT... libraryblogs.utsouthweste... | Registration Number Search | Doctor Search | College of Physicians and... cpso.on.ca | Google Search organicmd.org |
See also: Wikipedia:Search engine test One of the biggest fallacies in determining notability of a subject is the "Google test," essentially the number of results that come from a Google search using the title of an article or subject. It may be easy to view a something as being notable solely because entering the term into a search engine like Google produces a huge number of hits, not notable because the search produces very few hits, or a hoax because it produces none it all. While such searches are indeed a very useful tool, they do not in themselves determine notability or lack thereof. When performing a plain web search, it is possible that an awful lot of hits will turn up. But most probably, the majority of these will not count as reliable sources. Google News, Google Books, and Google Scholar provide results that are more likely to be reliable sources. While you may not be able to view all of them on the Google site itself, and many of them are previews, these can at least show that the sources exist. There is nothing wrong with pointing others to these sources when trying to get others to improve an article or to save it when up for deletion, even within one's comment. This is actually a good idea if you are looking for others to help save an article. But the results alone are not grounds for protecting an article from deletion.
[edit] Google searches are not referencesIt has become a practice in deletion discussions to quote a Google search or Google News search and say "look at all the results, there's your references". However, Google provides everything that can be found online, a huge majority of which is by no means a reliable source, and Google News reprints large swathes of material which may or may not be reliable, may or may not be relevant to the subject of the article, and may or may not still be there by the time the AFD closes! So therefore, if you find sources using Google related to a topic under discussion for deletion, great! But cite the exact reference or source you've found, rather than making a vague wave at the Google search and saying that it proves the article is notable, verifiable, and worth climbing the Reichstag over. [edit] Why are Google results not valid?See also: WP:COMMONWORD and WP:COMMONPHRASE Wikipedia is not a dictionary. A dictionary focuses on words or phrases, exactly as they are titled, and generally without deviating from that title. Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, whose purpose is to tell about a person, group, place, object, event, or concept. Any of these may be known by one or more titles or groups of words, and any such title may have more than one meaning. While every Wikipedia article has a title, it is not the title that defines the subject, but the information contained within. Search engines like Google focus on words or phrases, like the title of an article that one would likely enter into one. For example, if one wanted information on oil painting, s/he may enter the two words "oil painting" into a search engine (in quotes). This will likely produce plenty of web sites bearing the words "oil painting" in succession. As this is such a well known concept, it is likely many of these hits will tell about oil painting. But the query may also produce a site that contains the words "She was eating a salad topped with olive oil, painting a picture of a tree, and listening to music." This sentence has the words "oil painting" in succession, and therefore, would turn up in such a google query. But it has nothing to do with oil painting. If you were to enter the phrase "was running laps" into a search engine, you would get a number of hits that contain these words in that exact succession. The sentence fragment may appear on a site that reads something like "He was running laps at the local track." But this does not mean there should be an article titled Was running laps. A google search of the common word if produces several billion hits. On Wikipedia, the title If does not define the word if. Rather, it leads to a disambiguation page displaying a long list of subjects, including many songs, that happened to be titled "if" or with the initials IF. Still, the meaning of the common word if is restricted to a dictionary entry, and can only be written about on Wiktionary. The word around produces nearly a billion Google hits. But the word around by itself cannot be made into an enyclopedia article. There are no subjects worthy of an article titled "around." So there is no Wikipedia page titled around. [edit] Listing Google search resultsAfter reading this, you may think that listing the results of a Google search in a deletion debate is a bad thing. That is not true at all. Listing them may actually be helpful in saving an article from deletion. While the Google results will not make or break the case, they may be helpful toward others in making necessary improvements to save an article from deletion, or merely to agree what should be done. The editor who provides the listing of Google results may not be able to make the necessary improvements him/herself. Doing so is not required. But others who see these results may be able to take care of this, or even mention that these more specific sources do exist, even if they do not add the sources themselves (see WP:HASREFS). The {{rescue}} tag, if added to a page proposed for deletion, will provide these links. [edit] See also[edit] External links |
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