Using The Google Counter In The Supreme Court

from the oh,-please-make-it-stop... dept

It seemed bad enough when a story popped up talking about journalists relying on the number of results of a Google search as some sort of proof of something - but I didn't expect such unscientific research to show up in the Supreme Court. However, reports concerning the hearing on whether or not the COPA child porn law is Constitutional, apparently Solicitor General Theodore Olson used the oh-so-scientific method of proving his point by claiming that a Google search on "free porn" turned up 6,230,000 sites. One of the justices immediately suspected that this isn't indicative of much and responded by asking if Olson could prove they all actually had porn. He responded with a joke, saying, he "didn't have time to see them all." While it apparently got a laugh, hopefully, the Justices will cut off that line of "evidence" to support an argument.

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 

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  1. what about just plain "free"? by aNonMooseCowherd on Mar 4th, 2004 @ 8:10am

    Apparently he also couldn't be bothered jumping to the middle or the end of the list to see how many of the sites matched just because they contained the word "free".

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. That's It? by beck on Mar 4th, 2004 @ 8:30pm

    Based on Google's index of over 4 billion pages, compared to 6 million pages with free porn, that's less than 2 tenths of 1 percent of all web pages.

    So according to Google, 99.85% of the web does not have free porn. Why are they even spending time and taxpayer dollars on this?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. And saw it all..... by I have looked on Jan 25th, 2006 @ 1:48am

    and I hurt

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. no way! by kiwi on Jul 1st, 2007 @ 9:57pm

    i agree with beck, enough already
    tn_greco@yahoo.com.au

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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