A picayune under five year ago , I stick angry about a piece of bastard data , and I decided to do something about it . I was reading a formula in the New York Times , and the recipe told me , as many , many recipe had order me before , that it would take about 10 minutes of cooking to caramelise onions .
I knew from personal experience that this was a prevarication . Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions , and when you observe the recipes , you either got slenderly fake onion or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule . So I caramelized some onions and register how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and perpetually agitate them , 45 minutes if you were sane about it — and Ipublished those results on Slate , along with a denouncement of the false five - to-10 minute standard .
It might be the most worthful journalistic work I ’ve ever done . After the piece went up , I pick up again and again from readers who had thought they were unequal to James Cook , because they ’d trusted recipes that deceived them . The New York Times began publishing accurate onion - cook sentence and evencited the Slate clause . The workplace made it into the Wikipedia varlet for caramelization for a while , until someone dinged it because I am “ not a train chef ” ( and because some crank had render to rebut it with a high - powered eating place stove ) . Years after the fact , people still tell me that reading the truth made a difference in their lives .
So when I realize the news that Google ’s hunting resultant box has been giving people bogus info in its algorithmic hunt for the One True Answer to various doubt , I thought about the onions . If Google ca n’t figure out whether Barack Obamais plot a coup or not , orwhether or not MSG is lethal , can it at least make out that the prevarication about cooking onions is a lie ?
I typed “ how long does it take to caramelize onions ” into Chrome . The response was bad than I could have envisage :
Not only does Google , the world ’s preeminent index of information , tell its users that caramelise onion lease “ about 5 minutes”—it pull that information from an clause whose intact point was to tell the great unwashed exactly the opposite . A block of text from the Times that I had published as a quotation , to instance how it was a Trygve Lie , had been extracted by the algorithm as the authoritative truth on the study .
Five year after I retrieve I had buried the falsehood about immediate onion plant preparation , Google is dragging it out of its grave accent to send it scuffle into unsuspicious users ’ kitchens . In fact , it made the Trygve Lie even bad , because Google ’s automate school text analysis is too silent to recognize that “ about 5 arcminute ” followed by “ about 5 minutes longer ” mean 10 transactions .
Do not strain caramelize onions in five instant . And do not listen to Google .
UPDATE : At some percentage point after this Emily Post was published , Google discontinue promote “ about 5 minutes ” as the correct answer and began extract a more relevant passage from the original place :
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