A little under five years ago, I got angry about a piece of fake information, and I decided to do something about it. I was reading a recipe in the New York Times, and the recipe told me, as many, many recipes had told me before, that it would take about 10 minutes of cooking to caramelise onions.

I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took five or 10 minutes to caramelise onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelised some onions and recorded how long it really took — 28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it — and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard.

When asked about onions, Google can't tell the difference between the truth and an obvious falsehood. What else is it wrong about?

It might be the most valuable journalistic work I've ever done. After the piece went up, I heard again and again from readers who had thought they were incompetent cooks, because they'd trusted recipes that deceived them. The New York Times began publishing accurate onion-cooking times and even cited the Slate article. The work made it into the Wikipedia page for caramelisation for a while, until someone dinged it because I am "not a trained chef" (and because some crank had tried to rebut it with a high-powered restaurant stove). Years after the fact, people still tell me that reading the truth made a difference in their lives.

So when I saw the news that Google's search result box has been giving people bogus information in its algorithmic search for the One True Answer to various, I thought about the onions. If Google can't figure out whether Barack Obama is plotting a coup or not, or whether or not MSG is lethal, can it at least recognise that the lie about cooking onions is a lie?