Netchecking and some Psychology

Chris pointed me Chad Lundgren's blog entry on Google and Psychological Reality. Chad refers to John Rhodes' post on netchecking, which essentially means checking their facts using Google or some other search engine. I liked the following section of Chad's post (before he wandered off on a merry tangent): Google does not find the most authoritative source. It finds what people believe to be the most authoritative source. It is a good meter of what people believe something to mean. This is the psychological definition of reality: someone can have an intense belief that seems to them as real as anything else, but only they see. For some things, the only physical manifestation the rest of us can see is chemical level in the person afflicted.