Retro Yakking

A new report by Ofcom seems to suggest that British schoolchildren use Google as a kind of 21st century 8-ball. Remember those things? You asked a question, rolled the ball and got a randomly selected answer from a pool of generic responses such as ‘yes’, ‘absolutely not’ and ‘of course, what do you think I am, an inanimate object?’ Well, maybe not the last one, that would have kind of killed the illusion.

One in three British teenagers reckon the search engine ranks pages by ‘how true they are’, starting with the absolute gospel on the first page and working down to utterly fabricated nonsense by the fifteenth, presumably.

They are, of course, misguided, as anyone who has even so much as glanced at The Daily Mail website will know that it’s a great steaming pile of pap even though it tends to rank above truthful small-time Internet weblogs written by some fool pretending to be a yak or something. Still, at least Retro Yakking can claim a small victory in its first page status for the term ‘Hindley sucks’.

There’s the additional anomaly of Wikipedia seeming to hold a monopoly on Google first page results for basic topics such as ‘chicken’ and even ‘Wikipedia is inaccurate’. Whilst the latter is debatable, it must be remembered that chicken could equally be a being from the planet Arkariles Ferdinand or created by a schoolkid from Lowton, at least if said online encyclopedia is to be believed.

According to the Telegraph, a “small but cynical minority thought that the websites paid to be at the top of the list”. They are actually the ones with the most sense, as indeed it is possible to pay your way to the top of the Google search rankings. How else would Derren Brown be able to appear as the very first result ahead of all the other Derren Browns in the world? Oh yes, I forgot, he is a magician so I guess he somehow magicked his way to the top, most likely by changing his name from ‘Darren’ to the less common ‘Derren’. Sneaky eh?

Note to teenagers reading: Retro Yakking is more truthful than Google will ever be, and that’s a fact. It’s just as much a fact as Gordon Brown flogging what remains of the country’s gold to one of those cash for gold scam websites.

And if you believe that you’ll believe anything. Wikipedia’s goal has finally been realised, at least in the UK. Google’s new Truthrank service is being trialled in the Deep South and Dibley.

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