Daniel M. Russell > Quotes

“there’s a lot of not-so-great scholarship out there, even in books and what seems like primary sources. In particular, there’s a lot of repetition of
errors that were introduced early on and somehow never corrected. (That’s what I mean by poor scholarship. Just repeating something that you found on the internet doesn’t make it right; it merely makes it repetitious. And if you didn’t double check it in the first place, you’re earning yourself a particularly nasty place in hell”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics

“The increasing sophistication in representing world knowledge online also implies that asking the right questions will become more of a skill. A common error made among beginning searchers is to pose queries that have a built-in bias, a kind of leading question. A question that “leads the witness” wouldn’t be allowed in a courtroom and shouldn’t be in your research queries either. This is fairly common among K–12 students who don’t yet understand the basics of web search and often frame their questions with built-in assumptions. In cases like this, you need to know that the results are ordered by rank depending on the terms in the query.

Take the following query:
[is the average length of an octopus 25 inches?]
It will give web links in the search results page that look right, but there’s an assumption within the query—that is, that octopuses actually are, on average, 25 inches in length. The web search results will be a bit misleading because there are so many positive hits that mention the terms “octopus” and “25 inches” on the same page. In this case, the search engine doesn’t really understand the question, but gives pages that best match the query, with its biases built in.”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics

“How can I read it and understand what’s going on in complex texts? I have a two-step process for making this understandable.
First, I read through the article, searching for terms and concepts that I don’t understand. I look up these terms, usually by opening new tabs with the searches, both so I won’t lose my place in the original article and have several pages open for reference. My friend and colleague at Stanford, Sam Wineburg, calls this method “lateral reading,” which emphasizes understanding the gestalt by pursuing multiple searches in parallel.
Second, it often helps to simplify the text into a form that I understand. That is, I go sentence by sentence (or paragraph by paragraph) rewriting the article in language that I can comprehend. This is a bit slow, but it frequently really helps reduce complicated language into something you can understand. Don’t be intimidated by complex language. Be a bold reader!”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics

“When you’re doing your own online research, you have to take note when your sources are copying other sources. When you find the wholesale lifting of texts, you should be worried, since it suggests that the research underlying the document hasn’t been checked carefully. Copying like that is the mark of a lazy researcher; don’t trust that article (but perhaps look around for the original).

As I do my research, I’ll sometimes notice when particular phrases (especially clever and curious turns of language) keep reappearing as I read.
Those are the sentences (or sentence fragments) you want to double check. One hint is to look for those repeated phrases. As you check for duplication, you don’t want to check for duplicate titles. But a well-chosen phrase (that is, one that’s central to the argument, and long enough to be unlikely to happen by accident) can be a useful way to see how far that article has spread. People often choose to copy rather than rewrite the central idea of an article.”
― Daniel M. Russell, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics