I thought it would be worthwhile to update this conversation with a look at the criteria Google actually uses in asking people to evaluate search results as high, medium, or low quality:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdfNot saying it helps or hinders the phenomena I was talking about earlier, just thought it was interesting.
This answer, for instance, addressed one of my direct concerns:
Are we just giving High quality ratings to pages that “look” good?
"No! The goal is to do the exact opposite. These steps are designed to help you
analyze the page without using a superficial “does it look good?” approach."
Which is good! But I'm not always sure how well that's put into practice.
There have been times I find incredibly worthwhile, directly relevant, primary academic content from a respected expert on a particular subject, but the website is buried on a University domain and looks like it hasn't been updated since 1999.
And it'll show up on Google eventually, but it takes me, like, 30 minutes of trying out and winnowing search criteria on Google before it'll even start allowing me to see sites like that (6 or 7 pages back).
They do have
Google Scholar though, which I'll admit I haven't used as much, and may actually address some of these issues.
In that same vein, Google Books is both a magnificent human achievement and a frustrating tangle of copyright issues. There's a fantastic Atlantic article on the subject:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/Much as we feel like the internet's an infinite repository of information, I think we can also trick ourselves into forgetting how much we're not seeing.
