How do we change the fact that when someone googles a few key terms to conduct their own scientific research … regarding something important in their own lives … they often end up with several pages of woo and garbage?

There are a lot of people in search engine research who want to be able to refine search models using user behavior and nothing else. To the extent that’s happening now, the more that people click on woo and link to woo, the higher the woo is going to be in the rankings.

My personal view is that search engines have a role in educating, and therefore should not just fit to what people seem to want. The developers of search engines have some responsibility to make sure the engines can fulfill that role. And I note that the developers don’t necessarily need to know anything about how to distinguish woo from non-woo; they just need to find the right people to make those distinctions and put them to work.

Anyway, in my view what you’re asking here is strongly tied to the models the search engines are using as well as what the masses of users are doing with them, and any solution you come up with is very susceptible to changes in those models or behavior patterns. I’m curious what people at the panel said about it though.