search Engine Test

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wiki's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:SET WP:GOOG WP:GOOGLE WP:GOOGLETEST WP:GTEST

This page in a nutshell: Measuring is easy. What's hard is knowing what it is you're measuring and what your measurement can mean. Web searches test the understanding of the WP:Five pillars of Wiki English.

This facilitates research by offering an immediate variety of applicable options. Possibly useful items on the results list include the source material or the electronic tools that a web site can provide, such as a dictionary, but the list itself, as a whole, can also indicate important information. However, discerning that information may require insight.

Search engine results can help editors retain (what is notable) or delete (what is not verifiable) source material, depending on their reliability. There is a high demand for reliability on Wiki English. Discerning the reliability of the source material is an especially core skill for using the web, while the wiki itself only facilitates the creation of multiple drafts. As presentations and deletions progress, this variety of choices for input tend to produce the desired objective—a neutral viewpoint. Depending on the type of query and kind of search engine, this variety can open up to a single author.

1. Popularity – See Google's trending tool below.
2. Usage – Identify a term's notability. (See for example Google's ngram tool.)
3. Genuineness – Identify a spurious hoax or an urban legend.
4. Notability – Decide whether a page should be nominated for deletion.
5. Existence – Discover what sources (including websites) actually exist for possible presentation.
6. Information – Review the reliability of facts and citations.
7. Names and terminology – Identify the names used for things (including alternative names and terminology).
8. Copyrighting – Identify whether material is copied, and if so, check the licensing.

This page describes both these web search tests and the web search tools that can help develop Wikipedia, and it describes their biases and their limitations.

The advantages of a specific search engine can be distinguished by using a variety of common search engines. The distinct advantages of each are their user interface and, less obviously, their algorithms for compiling and searching their own indexes. Because a web crawler can be blocked—specific ones or just in general—different search engines can list different web sites, and there are more web sites available by URL than are indexed in any database.

The most common search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Specialized search engines exist for medicine, science, news and law amongst others. Several generalized search engines exist. These adapt your query to many search engines. See § Common search engines below. This page mostly uses Google instead of Bing or Yahoo, but aims for generality where it can. For example, it describes Google Groups (usenet groups), Google Scholar (academia), Google News, and Google Books.

If an unsourced addition to an article appears plausible, consider taking a moment to use a suitable search engine to find a reliable source before deciding whether to revert.

Depending on the subject matter, and how carefully it is used, a search engine test can be very effective and helpful, or produce misleading or non-useful results. In most cases, a search engine test is a first-pass heuristic or "rule of thumb".

What a search test can do, and what it can't

A search engine can index pages and text which others have placed on the internet, just like a big index at the back of a book.

Search engines can:

• Provide information and lead to pages that assist with the above goals
• Confirm "who's reported to have said what" according to sources (useful for neutral citing)
• Often provide full cited copies of source documents
• Confirm roughly how popularly referenced an expression is. Note, however, that Google searches may report vastly more hits than will ever be returned to the user, especially for exact quoted expressions. For example, a Google search for "the green goldfish", with quotes, in 2021 initially reports around 209,000 results, yet on paging through to the last search results page shows the returned number of hits to be 303. See also here to calculate statistical significance.
• Search more specifically within certain websites, or for combined and alternative phrases (or excluding certain words and phrases that would otherwise confuse the results).

Search engines cannot:

• Guarantee the results are reliable or "true" (search engines index whatever text people choose to put online, true or false).
• Guarantee why something is mentioned a lot, and that it isn't due to marketing, reposting as an internet meme, spamming, or self-promotion, rather than importance.
• Guarantee that the results reflect the uses you mean, rather than other uses. (E.g., a search for a specific John Smith may pick up many "John Smiths" who aren't the one meant, many pages containing "John" and "Smith" separately, and also miss out all the useful references indexed under "J. Smith" or, if the term is put in quotes, "John Michael Smith" and "Smith, John")
• Guarantee you aren't missing crucial references through choice of search expression.
• Guarantee that little-mentioned or unmentioned items are automatically unimportant.
• Guarantee that a particular result is the original instance of a piece of text and not a reprint, excerpt, quotation, misquotation, or copyright violation.

and search engines often will not:

• Provide the latest research in depth to the same extent as journals and books, for rapidly developing subjects.
• Be neutral.

A search engine test cannot help you avoid the work of interpreting your results and deciding what they really show. Appearance in an index alone is not usually proof of anything.

Verifiability

Search engine tests may return results that are fictitious, biased, hoaxes or similar. It is important to consider whether the information used derives from reliable sources before using or citing it. Less reliable sources may be unhelpful, or need their status and basis clarified, so that other readers gain a neutral and informed understanding to judge how reliable the sources are.

Neutrality

Google (and other search systems) do not aim for a neutral point of view. Wikipedia does. Google indexes self-created pages and media pages which do not have a neutrality policy. Wikipedia has a neutrality policy that is mandatory and applies to all articles, and all article-related editorial activity.

As such, Google is specifically not a source of neutral titles – only of popular ones. Neutrality is mandatory on Wikipedia (including deciding what things are called) even if not elsewhere, and specifically, neutrality trumps popularity.

(See WP:NPOV § Neutrality and Verifiability for information on balancing the policies on verifiability and neutrality, and WP:NPOV § Article naming on how articles should be named)

Notability

Raw "hit" (search result) count is a very crude measure of importance. Some unimportant subjects have many "hits", some notable ones have few or none, for reasons discussed further down this page.

Hit-count numbers alone can only rarely "prove" anything about notability, without further discussion of the type of hits, what's been searched for, how it was searched, and what interpretation to give the results. On the other hand, examining the types of hit arising ^{[clarification needed]} (or their lack) often does provide useful information related to notability.

Additionally, search engines do not disambiguate, and tend to match partial searches. (However, as described below, you can eliminate partial matches by quoting the phrase to be matched): While Madonna of the Rocks is certainly an encyclopedic and notable entry, it's not a pop culture icon. However, due to Madonna matching as a partial match, as well as other Madonna references not related to the painting, the results of a Google or Bing search result count will be disproportionate as compared to any equally notable Renaissance painting. To exclude partial matches when Googling for the phrase, quote the phrase to be matched as follows: "Madonna of the Rocks".

Search engine expressions (examples and tutorial)

This section explains some search expressions used in Google web search. Similar approaches will work in many other search engines, and other Google searches, but always read their help pages for further information as search engines' capabilities and operation often differ. Note that if you are signed in to a Google account when searching on Google then this may affect the results that you get, based on your search history. Also be sure to check "Languages for Displaying (Search) Results" in "Search Settings".)

The single most useful search engine tool may be the use of quotation marks to find an exact match for a phrase. However, a search engine such as Google has both an easy, and an advanced search with further search options. The advanced search makes it easier to enter advanced options, that may help your searching. The following collapsible sections cover basic examples and help for using search engines with Wiki English.

Specialized search engines such as medical paper archives have their own specialized search structure not covered here.