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Bald assertions and search results
No, the ‘study’ does not show Prince William is the “world’s sexiest bald man”.
All that glitters is not gold. News websites claimed a study suggested Prince William is the “world’s sexiest bald man”. There were news articles on The Sun, Daily Mirror, and indy100 websites.
Who did this study and what did they do?
A cosmetics firm typed names of bald male celebrities and ‘sexy’ into Google. A person counted the number of search results.
Despite this method, some news articles refer to it as a ‘Google study’. This is incorrect. Google neither commissioned nor conducted this study.
What is the problem with this study?
The measure — the number of search results — has no validity. It is not measuring how many times people have called a male celebrity “sexy”.
This is the second sentence from the article in The Sun:
The 38-year-old Duke has been described as “sexy” a whopping 17.6million times online in blogs, reports and pages found in Google searches, researchers found.
Search engines work by scouring the internet for pages with ‘crawlers’. ‘Crawlers’ report back to the search engine…
