Baby colic causes babies to cry for hours and soon causes distress for the parents too. Many of them soon learn what the problem is and then go to their computer and use a search engine hoping to get good advice on a home treatment for colic.

Think for a moment and recognise the error of our ways. We completely trust the search engines to supply good results if we search for a treatment for our baby's colic or information on anything at all.

If we want to know something, whether it's about a colicky baby or it's a personal problem or we want to help a friend or maybe we want to research a subject so we can write an article and publish it online, our first move is what?

We use the search engines! And a lot of us 'Google' it. We do it so much that the word Google has become a verb! We tell friends with questions to 'Google' it. Need a home treatment for colic? Anyone could guess what you'll do.

What I'm saying here is that we go to the pc, do a search and click on some of the resulting websites, blogs or forums to read what other folk wrote about whatever our current interest is. One current interest, for thousands of unfortunate parents, is a remedy for baby colic.

A little hitch with doing this has recently occurred to me. It might be that you already have given this some thought, but here it is... We're using and trusting search engines but they are only software. This software is programmed to look for keywords that are relevant to the search terms used.

This programmed software, the search engines, can't discern truth from mistakes or complete fiction.

Also they bring up some results from years ago. If it's not up-to-date information then it's quite possible that the article, item or comment is no longer true (if it ever was). Events could be happening, unknown to the writers which make old beliefs incorrect now. This seems to be the case with a remedy for baby's colic.

This is troubling to me. Worried parents might not notice if they're reading out-dated stuff presented as facts. They need to be able to find up-to-date facts about curing baby colic.

Now, with the enormous amount of information online, writers research their subject first, on any subject, not just baby colic. They find and read what others have believed and written!

When they've patiently read lots of articles or comments left in blogs and taken notes, they write some of this newly gained material into their own article, seeming to be fairly knowledgeable, which is not the actual case. So for exhausted parents of colicky babies who keep finding the same kind of opinion on various websites, there is every chance they'll believe it, fact or not.

Because of this, babies still have colic and people searching for help on other health issues can be misled by these happenings. It's caused by inaccuracies and mistakes being repeated by article writers and then repeatedly shown in the search results by those engines we trust too much!

Day by day this situation can only worsen as more websites have errors in their statements. For searchers who don't know, the websites seem to be backing each other up. So surely this stuff must be true, the searchers think. The trouble is lots of folk have written about babies having colic, thousands in fact. Parents end up believing what they keep reading.

The mere fact that a statement is incorrect doesn't mean it won't be believed. If it's printed and often shows up in search results online it starts to be believed and accepted. This is very often a real shame for anguished parents of a baby with colic.

One day a woman comes along and writes what she knows to be true, from experience, not just an opinion, but the facts about the cure for baby colic. What would be the result of that? If her keywords are picked up by the search engines her website might even be on page one but this is highly unlikely. It happened to me, I'm happy to say!

There is a but though... That 'someone' writing their factual, helpful, accurate stuff is like a Voice in the Wilderness. All the other sites are still being shown, shouting down the little voice of truth. This must happen to so many honest folk trying to share their knowledge with an unbelieving world.

I do feel that the search engines and their inability to discern are partly to blame for crying babies still suffering from colic.