Merrily typing an entry for my blog the other day, I happened to drop in the word “deconvolve”. Of course it’s not exactly an everyday word. Many people might have needed to look it up, so I really ought to have phrased things differently or explained terms as an aside.

For those who are interested, deconvolve is the opposite of convolve (unsurprisingly), which in turn means to apply a convolution operation. Even though this description is getting a bit convoluted, convolution doesn’t mean the same thing as complicated or intricate. In fact convolution is a well-defined mathematical term like subtraction, multiplication or integration. It means a specific kind of numerical mixing.

For example, a security camera may create a blurred image. Mathematically, the recorded image is the convolution of the incoming light and the blurring characteristics of the lens and photoreceptor, etc.

You can measure the distortion by allowing controlled samples of light into the lens and recording the images that emerge. Armed with this evidence of exactly how the camera transforms light into pictures, it’s possible to use suitable software to reverse the effect – to deconvolve a blurred image into something sharper. This kind of deconvolution is used to enhance images for police investigations and for astronomy.

A couple of days after I wrote my item I received an email accusing me of dropping inappropriate jargon when what I really meant was simply “to untangle or unscramble”. The basis of the accusation was helpfully supplied: the number one Google result for “deconvolve” is a blog page that asserts scientists arrogantly use the word deconvolve when they mean untangle or unscramble.

“Exploring the matter of the KBO planetoid Quoar, I’ve skimmed through a scientific paper on the subject,” wrote the page’s author, Wirkman Virkkala. “And there I met up with some amazing jargon. My favourite example... is deconvolve.” Virkkala switches from skim-reading learned journals to flicking through a dictionary, and concludes the authors “might also have written that they could unroll, or (better yet) untangle, their data”.

Personally, I’d conclude that Virkkala needs a better dictionary.

There is, however, a bigger lesson here. Google has become the de facto gateway to a lot of knowledge. And the assumption is that Google’s number one hit must represent distilled wisdom. The reality, of course, is that Google’s PageRank algorithm is fallible. It can aggregate human wisdom, but it can also aggregate stupidity, and it can’t tell which is which.

The effects will be felt in business through the insidious effect of misinformation. In the future, it may become increasingly difficult to unscramble or untangle the effects of an over-reliance on iffy info from web-based sources.

There are already calls for firms to make their own, internal information as readily searchable as the web. Assuming their internal information is slightly more reliable than bloggers’ ramblings, it might be wise for firms pondering such projects to get a move on.