Friday, June 22, 2012

Another Dubious Internet Dictionary of Quotations

A month back we noted Thinkexist, an Internet quotation site that provides no sources for its quotations.

Another such site including the Goebbels quotation is Searchquotes. It claims: “Our goal is to help you by delivering amazing quotes to bring inspiration, personal growth, love and happiness to your everyday life.”  Like Thinkexist, it provides no information on who is behind it, nor does it give sources for its quotations.  It gets about 4,000,000 visitors a month, and probably provides a lot of advertising revenue to its owner, whomever that anonymous person or persons may be.

As always, do not trust anonymous sites of quotations.  Use a good print dictionary of quotations instead.

Tracking Report #4

Google remains puzzling.  Today (22 June 2012) a search for “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” gets 243,000 hits.  However, if one searches for the phrase plus “Goebbels,” the result is 943,000.  These results are similar to Tracking Report #3.

With the first search, the lead hit is our false Nazi quotations page, followed by the unreliable Thinkexist dictionary of quotations.  With the second search, Thinkexist gets the first two hits, followed by our site.