Misinformation on the Internet Rampant. False Claims Rank High on Search Engines

San Francisco, CA, March 10, 2010 We all have gotten them, emails making some pretty insane claims. We may have even passed some of them on ourselves. Many are harmless and silly or obviously false. Unfortunately some of them are so clever and have been around so long they are now posing as facts on the wider internet and not just in emails anymore.

One of the main problems is how websites and the corresponding information is ranked. No big surprise but accuracy and truthfulness are not one of the determining factors for ranking. Often these false claims rank as high as the factual ones. In some cases the real facts can be pushed so far down in ranking they may as well not exist. 

Only when I started doing research for the database for my iphone app. did I realized how bad it was. Example sodium lauryl sulfate, a search on it will return as many results saying it is carcinogenic as those that say it is not. In fact it is not. I fund scores of these while doing research on food ingredients. 

Attempts to scare consumers from products are just the tip of the iceberg. Even more worrisome are all the false claims that something is healthy. These claims can be expensive at best and at worst dangerous. Multiply this by thousands of topics and you begin to see the problem. The old medicine shows and snake oil pitchmen are still alive and well on the net.

There are some groups such as snopes.com and truthorfiction.com that are helping debunk hundreds of these claims. They can't catch everything. As an internet user you have to take some responsibility. Search wisely, use terms such as hoax or myth in your search terms. These can at least warn you of possible false claims. I also recommend an article by David Emery, How To Spot an Email Hoax on about.com (click here). Good luck. Practice defensive internetting.