infobong.com

Juan Cole has a post describing a political tactic called a "GoogleSmear," where right-wing commentators use the Google search engine as a means of authenticating data. It strikes me as a little funny to think that the reliance on Google and the Internet more generally is one of the issues librarians and teachers frequently complain about when working with students new to research, yet political types with vast social capital can promote this fallacy.

In one form, the GoogleSmear makes the argument that if information is not indexed by Google, it is a lie. Cole describes the experience of UC-Irvine history professor Mark Levine, where " a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on Google." Cole himself is frequently the target of right-wing attacks, where his credibility is attacked on the basis of his job; the reasoning seems to go, "Professors, who spend much of their lives collecting and analyzing information about a topic, have no credibility on that topic because they're professors."

Cole also describes a second instantiation of the GoogleSmear, where right-wing commentators:

Considering the way that Google is increasingly used as an arbiter of political debates or as an infallible source of information, it would be nice to develop some kind of campaign to educate the public on how Google works and what are appropriate and inappropriate uses of the tool. I suspect some librarian has a page somewhere describing what we know about Google, but, given Google's lack of transparency and alleged bias, it seems like we need a more broad-based effort to debunk myths about the search engine.