‘Google says I’m a dead physicist’: is the world’s biggest search engine broken?

For decades now, anyone who's wanted to know everything about anything has asked Google. But is the platform losing its edge - and can we still trust it to tell us the truth?

I didn't know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years". Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.

The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a knowledge panel", a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland". Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.