User:R. fiend/The Google Test

I wrote this on the talk page of Google Test quite some time ago, but now that I'm doing subpages, I think I'll copy it here. This version may vary from that on the talk page, as it is likely i will make edits to it.


 * In my opinion there should be some sort of loose stated hierarchy of how many hits is significant for a subject. Something along these lines, starting with subjects that would require the highest number of google hits to be deemed a significant result:
 * Porn stars. Any attarctive woman willing to show off her (usually large) breasts can easily surpass most nobel prize winners in google hits. This does not in itself make them notable. There are thousands and thousands of people in the porn industry, and while quite a few are notable, Jenna Jameson is the exception more than the rule.
 * Internet phenomena. Usually the results of a google search indicate only a small fraction of the number of times a subject has been mentioned in print, conversation, over the airwaves, etc. Then there are those things that exist almost only on the internet. Googling Winston Churchill gets me just under 2,000,000 google hits, which is still only a fraction of the times he has been mentioned in some form. Now googling slashdot gets me nearly 9,000,000. Is slashdot 4 times more significant and encyclopedic than Churchill? Clearly not. The slashdot hits basically represent slashdot in its entirety. Clearly both are encyclopedic, but it's easy to see how the google test favors slashdot.
 * Figures in entertainment. Through promotion, and the fact that rather frivilous things such as movie stars get more than their share of mention on the internet, entertainemnt figures are overrepresented. The "information superhighway" is as much an "entertainment superhighway". Of course, many of these figures are discussed inordinately outside of the internet as well. And since fame generally means notability in some form, the google test here is only slightly favors this category.
 * Subjects that have been existent/active in the internet's heyday and Famous people who are alive/were alive at that time. This is many subjects, and what many people have in mind when doing the google test. Things to keep in mind are, for example, someone who served in the US House of Representatives from 1997-2001 will likely have more google hits than a comparable person who served from 1957-1961. This does not make the first person more notable, it's just that he was alive during the internet age.
 * Converse of the above. In this category we have our second congressman. Another example is Gaius Gracchus, who gets less than 7,000 hits, and Dennis Kucinich, who gets 354,000.
 * Obscure/esoteric subjects of an encyclopedic nature. Open any encyclopedia and it shouldn't take you long to find something/someone you've never heard of. Some of these will yield few google hits. Various technical/scientific subjects fall into this category. The bar is lower for these things because they aren't necessarily discussed in the mainstream. Of course, everything scientific is by no means encyclopedic, but one must not dismiss them because they don't have as many google hits as that guy who played "Man in Elevator" in that movie about the college kids on a panty raid, and his article was deleted.
 * This being said, anything that results in no google hits at all is very unlikely to be encyclopedic. If it exists, it's likely mentioned somewhere on the internet, but even that is not always true. None of this is ever meant to be set in stone, just as the google test itself should not be. But it should give some food for thought to those people who take the flat view that 3,000 hits passes the test but 400 fails, or whatever. It is much more complex than that.