Google's semantic web needs to be careful

lisa Lisa, 5th April 2013

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!).

Walter Gilbey

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!


More from our blog

18a win Netty 2024 award for Activibees.com

18a win Netty 2024 award for Activibees.com

29.02.24

We are delighted to announce that 18a has been recognised for its outstanding work in the "Web Design Agency of the Year - UK" category at… Read →

Generating an Effective Content Security Policy with your Laravel React App

Generating an Effective Content Security Policy with your Laravel React App

27.02.24

I recently had an interesting problem to solve. I'd built a brand new author website on a shiny installation of Laravel 10, utilising its out-of-the-box… Read →

If your WordPress website looks broken, it could be because of this.

If your WordPress website looks broken, it could be because of this.

15.02.24

WordPress is the incredibly popular blogging-come-full-website platform that powers over 835 million websites* in 2024. It's functionality is extended by plugins, and one such very… Read →