At Wired, David Gilbert, whose beat includes “disinformation,” notes a curious fact about Google’s utterly dominant search engine: Patrik Hermansson, a UK-based researcher studying racism, found he was getting highly questionable information about worldwide IQs from the Google search engine that most people use without awareness that there are many others:

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Hermansson logged in to Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations. When he typed in “Pakistan IQ,” rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI-powered Overviews tool, which, confusingly to him, was on by default. It gave him a definitive answer of 80.

When he typed in “Sierra Leone IQ,” Google’s AI tool was even more specific: 45.07. The result for “Kenya IQ” was equally exact: 75.2.

Hermansson immediately recognized the numbers being fed back to him. They were being taken directly from the very study he was trying to debunk, published by one of the leaders of the movement that he was working to expose.

The results Google was serving up came from a dataset published by Richard Lynn, a University of Ulster professor who died in 2023 and was president of the Pioneer Fund for two decades.

“His influence was massive. He was the superstar and the guiding light of that movement up until his death. Almost to the very end of his life, he was a core leader of it,” Hermansson says.

“Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity Are Promoting Scientific Racism in Search Results,” October 24, 2024

Not much reliable information?

It turns out that Microsoft’s Copilot and Perplexity were using the same source. The Wired article hints that there isn’t much reliable information about IQs worldwide. That could well be how a search engine ends up focusing on any source that provides answers, even if they are not reliable ones. Gilbert finds some evidence that Google is trying to improve.

Here at Mind Matters News, we put “Pakistan IQ” and “Sierra Leone IQ” into Freespoke, a lesser-known search engine. We received a variety of links, none of which went to an academic source — a red flag right away.

Just for fun we tried “Canada IQ” as well. The first three results were for “investor quotient.” followed by items such as a racist diatribe, a claim that Canadians have higher IQs than Americans, and iQ Power Tools.

There was, further down, a world ranking of countries’ IQs, to be sure. But its status as a research tool is unclear, especially when we read in the notes “Substantial research on the subject of national IQs was conducted by psychologist Richard Lynn (1930-2023).”

Three takeaways

Search engines are not much help when the topic is, in principle, murky. At worst, they can create a sense of reliability when private skepticism would serve better. Second — and this is really important — use several search engines, not just one. Here’s a list you can put on your desktop as an icon.

Last but not least: If it sounds unbelievable, don’t believe it. And when in doubt, doubt.