Lies, damned lies and search engines

[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

“Google has caught Microsoft with its hand in its
search-engine cookie jar. That’s bad, but it also leads me to the
question, How much can you trust any search engine?

“If Microsoft were a dog, I’d be scolding it for its latest
foolishness. It turns out that rather than searching the Internet
on its own, it’s been riding the coattails of Google. This isn’t
just a theory. Google set up a clever trap, and Microsoft’s search
engineers fell right into it.

“It’s an interesting little story, and I’ll get into the juicy
details in a minute. But the affair also leads me to ask the
general public whether they have ever recognized that the results
that search engines supply are inherently prone to bias and
incompleteness. The extent to which that is true is something that
every Web user should grapple with.”

Complete Story