18a

Google's semantic web needs to be careful

5th April 2013 04:00 by lisa

We've just had a conversation about Gilbey's Gin, after a client of ours did some work for them.

So, the first thing I did was Google "Gilbey's Gin", which brought back a result showing me a photo of Sir Walter Gilbey, along with a photo of him and some info about him.

However - we then noticed that Sir Walter Gilbey lived from 1831 - 1914, yet the colour photo looks like it's from the 70s or 80s (yes, the 80s are starting to look quite old now!).


Google has harvested this information from other websites, such as wikipedia, and is trying to collate it's information so that we don't even need to visit other sites - we can get the info we want straight from the search results. But sometimes that information is going to be wrong, because the sources are wrong or because it's slightly skewed as it's collated.

So this is just a reminder that Google is still fallable - and if you are researching something important, perhaps dig a little deeper for a while yet!