The Googlization of Everything

Interesting, though blaming "user generated content" for the error, as the author of the piece you link to does, seems to me to be basically incorrect. The error here has been committed by google's proprietary algorithm, not Wikipedia's editors. Wikipedia's categorization system, reflected by its on-site search engine, correctly refers readers to the article on the singer if they search for "Michael Jackson," providing a link to a disambiguation page for those who would like to find information on this writer. The writer's article is distinguished by the nice, human-readable URL "Michael_Jackson(writer)" as per wiki-custom.

This is not to say that the google-wikipedia search result linkage does not produce some odd, and often hilarious, results due to the user-generated nature of wikipedia. About 2 weeks ago I searched for the term "epiphany" (I was using google to check my spelling) and found the excerpt given for the second google result showed part of the wikipedia disambiguation page on the term. I'm not sure why, but the section displayed was actually vandalism, claiming that a "epiphany animal" was a "cross between a shetland pony and my little pony." I went ahead and removed this vandalism from the wikipedia page. Google no longer displays it.

off-the-wall comments on that post aside, google has had long enough to beat it into our heads that they know just what we are looking for. perhaps it is human nature to assume then, that they do.

since i can't repeat the search in question (i'll be there if i could, maybe tomorrow), it is hard to say if google is simple as a-b-c pulling the top hit from wikipedia, or something else. perhaps they are actually *not* workin' day and night on responding to click-trends, and not at the point where they are some kind of smooth criminal who publishes dossiers on famous (or not famous people). or maybe they are just bad. i blame it on the boogie.