In the current issue of The New Yorker, the historian Anthony Grafton (Princeton) writes about the history of the effects of technological developments on books, concentrating, in particular, on the present. The following passage caught my attention in particular:
Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.” Google’s famous search algorithm emulates the principle of scholarly citation—counting up and evaluating earlier links in order to steer users toward the sources that others have already found helpful. In a sense, the system resembles nothing more than trillions of old-fashioned footnotes.
Putting aside Grafton's slightly Panglossian view of how Google works, I'm wondering whether the point about research is true of philosophers? Do you, philosophical readers, generally "begin[] by consulting a search engine"? And if it is true, what does that mean for the dissemination of scholarship? For example, if you google "Nietzsche's moral philosophy," the first entry is my essay on "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and if you google "legal realism," the first entry is from Wikipedia, the second my SSRN paper on "American Legal Realism." Someone searching for "Donald Davidson" gets the SEP entry first, followed by the Wikipedia entry. The SEP essay also comes up first in a search for "mental causation."
To the extent, then, that philosophers, or philosophy students, start their research with Google, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is going to play a quite big role in shaping the reception of ideas and also, one suspects, in determining what secondary literature becomes part of the "canon" on a particular topic. Fortunately, SEP is generally of high quality. The same can not be said of Wikipedia, of course, as we have had occasion to note previously.
But the real question is this, and I'd be interested to hear from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty: are philosophers using Google for research? are you? if you're using it, how do you use it?
I can report my own practice. I don't use Google for research, though I do often start research on a topic I know little about using the search engine at the SEP page. What I do use Google for a fair bit is if I have a quote, but don't have the precise cite for it: Googling a distinctive quote almost invariably turns up sites with the full reference (of course, it is advisable to double-check the reference!).