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The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless. You are as likely to return incorrect information as you are complete fabrications, and the people who put this content on the Internet do not care. The people who hold the purse strings for Sports Illustrated are more interested in gaming Google search results and the resultant ad revenue from that practice than actually serving their readers.The last part of the conclusion to this article is true: people who put shitty content on the Internet don't care, and are only interested in ad revenue. (Incidentally that's why advertising is bad: it gives the wrong incentives. It's possible that ad blockers will save the Internet.)
But the first part isn't true: Google is still useful, especially when used as it was first meant to be used. Google started as a search engine, meaning: a tool to find documents in a corpus. It wasn't an oracle, and still isn't, despite how much it wants to be, or users want it to be.
Search for documents, go read them, evaluate if what they say seems to make sense and who wrote them, try to do a comparison between different sources to see where they converge and where they diverge, and then draw your own conclusions.
> If that means the rest of us get information about inflamed penises when we’re trying to know how long sinus inflammation is supposed to last, well, I guess we’re shit out of luck.
If you can't be bothered to know the difference between a sinus and a penis then sorry, not sorry.