Phil Bradley's weblog

Boolify for easier searching; great for kids as well

There used to be a really good site called Boolify several years ago, which had a drag and drop approach to building searches. You simply clicked on a building block such as 'word' or 'not' and dropped it into the work area, adding in your terms as you went. The search was then mirrored for you in a search box, and was then executed. Boolify died but has been taken over and resurrected by Kidzsearch and you can find it on their website here: https://www.kidzsearch.com/boolify/ It's still very simple to use, though it can be a little bit fiddly to get the blocks in the right order, and it does add in unnecessary double quotes, but it's a good approach to getting children (and maybe novice adult searchers) to think about search construction. The limitation as far as adults are concerned is that it does only search the children's search engine, which isn't a criticism, just an observation. I've attached a screenshot, so you can see exactly what I mean.

Google's idea of a cure for cancer? Carrot juice.

It's very tempting to search for your symptoms and other related medical information on Google, but you need to warned; Google isn't exactly accurate with the stuff that it brings back. A search for 'cure for cancer' brings us back lots of interesting stuff, but the top result is from a site called Cancer Tutor, which I'm not going to link to, because it's full of crap. I'll copy a little of what it says however:

Many people have cured their newly diagnosed cancer by using a very healthy diet and drinking a quart of carrot juice (with a little beet juice mixed in) every day. That is all they did.

In fact, if all cancer patients did that instead of using chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, the “cure rate” for cancer in America would jump dramatically.

But who would make huge profits telling cancer patients to drink a quart of carrot juice, mixed with a little beet juice, every day, and eat a healthy diet? Certainly not the medical community and certainly not the pharmaceutical industry and media. Carrot juice and beet juice cannot be patented. Nor can a healthy diet be patented.

The general public is so brainwashed they think Nature is too stupid to be a medical doctor. Yet scientists only understand about 3 percent of human DNA after studying it since 1953. This means scientists still don't have a clue what 97 percent of all human DNA does.

So there you have it. Carrot juice. You can see the link from the screenshot that I grabbed:

Now, there's plenty of useful information on the page as well of course, but there's no getting away from the fact that Google has this as the #1 result. We've seen this happen time and time again with Google; it wasn't so long ago that a search for the reason that the dinosaurs became extinct lead us to the #1 result from an American right wing Christian website, also spouting all sorts of nonsense. Just another reason why 'don't trust Google' should be top of your list of things to say to novice searchers! There's a little more on the story from the Search Engine Roundtable website.