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What makes me maintain that Search Engines are partly to blame for babies still crying with colic?

Colic soon causes a nightmare situation when it happens to a newborn baby. Before long, parents realise what all the crying is for and a lot of them, in this computer-driven society, turn to the search engines for helpful information because they want a home treatment for colic.

If you think about it you’ll soon see we all make this mistake and place a lot of trust in search engines when wanting to find a cure for baby’s colic or find an answer to something else.

If we want to know something, whether it’s about a colicky baby or it’s a personal problem or we want to help a friend or maybe we want to research a subject so we can write an article and publish it online, our first move is what?

We use the search engines! And a lot of us ‘Google’ it. We do it so much that the word Google has become a verb! We tell friends with questions to ‘Google’ it. Need a home treatment for colic? Anyone could guess what you’ll do.

What I’m saying here is that we go to the pc, do a search and click on some of the resulting websites, blogs or forums to read what other folk wrote about whatever our current interest is. One current interest, for thousands of unfortunate parents, is a remedy for baby colic.

There’s a snag with this I should have thought of earlier. Maybe you already have realised but just in case you haven’t I’ll go on…It’s just software! All of those search engines we use are nothing but software. Websites, articles and blogs are shown, chosen by the search software for their relevant keywords.

Being just software, the engines don’t have any judgement about whether what has been written has any basis in truth. They cannot discern truth from fiction or error.

When the results presented by the search engines include items written months or years ago, then possibly the items are not true any longer. Maybe they never were. The writer’s beliefs are not necessarily the truth. This seems to be the trouble with searches for an effective baby colic remedy.

It’s disconcerting. People don’t always notice the date but they do expect up-to-date information especially on something as important as a colic remedy.

Now this is happening: People who have to write about baby’s colic or indeed any other subject, think they need to know more before starting to write. So they search online to see what’s been written before!

Next, of course, those searchers include in their own new article the stuff they’ve just read in the search results (re-arranging the words of course, to avoid plagiarism) and they appear to be somewhat expert on the subject although they’re not. Heaven help colicky babies if parents are relying on these articles which are likely to be inaccurate.

Because of this, babies still have colic and people searching for help on other health issues can be misled by these happenings. It’s caused by inaccuracies and mistakes being repeated by article writers and then repeatedly shown in the search results by those engines we trust too much!

All the time the situation gets a bit worse because people are continually writing in blogs or writing content for their own website and they’re including the well established but not correct statements they’ve read on other websites. There are many thousands of sites where the subject of babies and colic is covered.

The mere fact that a statement is incorrect doesn’t mean it won’t be believed. If it’s printed and often shows up in search results online it starts to be believed and accepted. This is very often a real shame for anguished parents of a baby with colic.

Then one day someone comes along and writes some truths, not conjecture, but truths about curing baby colic. What happens? The search engines do pick up the new websites, because the keywords are in them. They might even show them on page one of the results. Unlikely, but they might…and…Yes, I’ve had that experience and it’s brilliant!

There is a but though… That ’someone’ writing their factual, helpful, accurate stuff is like a Voice in the Wilderness. All the other sites are still being shown, shouting down the little voice of truth. This must happen to so many honest folk trying to share their knowledge with an unbelieving world.

This is why I attach some blame to the search engines for colicky babies not getting a colic cure.

Last 5 posts by Anne Agar

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Tags: Family