A New York Times story today – getting in on the Halloween theme – discussed “Supernatural Cleaning Methods“, a tongue-in-cheek look at how to get rid of ghosts in your house. While I realise it was light-hearted, it used a journalistic tactic that has always bothered me – using Google stats to portray the Internet audience as a bunch of whackos (which the ‘skeptics’ will gladly tell you…don’cha know we’re a millimetre from sliding into a seething pit of irrationality?):
You don’t believe in ghosts? Then you are either tragically out of step with the times or possibly a slovenly spiritual housekeeper looking for an excuse to avoid tidying up. A recent Google Internet search for getting rid of ghosts yielded nearly two million hits. By comparison, a search for cleaning rain gutters yielded 191,000.
Surprising stat, n’est ce pas? Okay, let’s whack “getting rid of ghosts” into Google, without any quotes. Whoah, 3,840,000 results. What about “cleaning gutters”? 414,000. Sounds like the reporter was on the money. But dig down into the “getting rid of ghosts” search results and we fairly quickly end up with pages on “Getting rid of ghost ants”, “Getting rid of ghost images” and “Getting rid of ghost emails”. All those crazy woo-woos, getting rid of their ghost ants…
Now let’s put the search terms within quotes. “Getting rid of ghosts”: 2250 results. “Cleaning gutters”: 70,600. And the former still includes hits for “ghost emails” and the like. So, basically, it’s a nonsense stat. Don’t believe the hype.
