On The WebAtlantic article about Google Site Search Is all that ‘Googling’ shorting out our brains? Could be. Posted: Today at 7:42 a.m. RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – Have you already “Googled” something today from your crackberry or other mobile device or your laptop or your desktop PC? Going Googling is contagious, isn’t it? The world’s most powerful search engine and Internet company links us to what we seek in milliseconds. So is Google also making us “stoopid”? That’s the thrust of a fascinating cover story in the latest issue of Atlantic magazine by Nicholas Carr. (His latest book is “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison t0 Google.) In so many ways, Google has become a crutch for us – just as Windows and other word processing programs have helped with such basics as grammar and spelling. If you don’t think you are addicted to Google, try to avoid using it for a day. Ok, 12 hours. Well, 3 hours. How about 60 minutes? I sometimes do some work at a firm that doesn’t permit access to the Net, let alone Google. Among the few tools available is the company’s database as well as its own Web site. Neither supports Google, relying on some other search engine that is about as useful as a dialup modem these days. I can’t live without Google – well, I can but it’s darn hard. Make a list of the reasons why you go Googling and it’s likely to be a long one. But by using Google so much are we dumbing ourselves down to the point that getting information the old fashion way – you looked up words or spellings or topics with diligent if frustrating searches of such things as phone directories and dictionaries – is torture. Do we forget how certain words are spelled because Google is so intuitive it corrects us before we realize we’ve made a mistake? Carr’s article goes much deeper than shortcuts, however. He discusses how our brains are apparently being affected by life on the Net. He’s concerned that he finds in-depth reading of books and lengthy articles to be a challenge. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing,” he wrote. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” If you have made it to this point of the article without going on another Google hunt, congratulations because here’s the link to Carr’s fascinating article. Have a Googling good day! Contact Rick Smith Copyright 2008 by WRAL.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I think it makes me smarter too. If I don't know what something is a Google it and LEARN about what I didn't know before. Those days of dragging big fat encyclopedias out is over.
we can share! there is enough Google for all of God's children....but I will go google to make sure. :cheers:
How about "Is Google the environmentally responsible thing to do?" Granted the Google farms suck up a lot of energy but is the overall carbon footprint smaller? Fewer Printed Materials Fewer trips to the Library in our big honking SUVs Fewer Libraries (that sucks) Knowledge distribution channels are more efficient Just a few off the top of my head.
Yeah, I think it makes me smarter. I no longer have to wonder about things. I'm an informationsaurus. I just love to get online and look up every query I have. I will even jot down notes if I am not near a PC, or record a memo on my phone. Yeah, I'm dorky like that.
How about "Is Google the socially responsible thing to do?" It's not in spanish That's all I got. Yes, it was a joke.
Where did that fact come from?? It is not the most "powerful" search engine. It is the most invasive and misleading and caters to selling you down the data highway. But it is not the most powerful. Amazing what propaganda and sales based on popularity can misrepresent into fact. The search features suck, no truncation or nesting, no full Boolean. Modifies your search with synonym, plural & singular and many other changes without your knowing. Any Link searches have to be exact. It's a sell out link chain and all America buys it. The articles comment on “stoopid” has merit in that fact alone. Millions of Americans go onto Google every day with no thought of looking elsewhere. Why? Because the word "Google" leads them down the synonymous road of idiotic association in lieu of self education. With the economy going south, advertising on the web and especially on Google, is going to increase. So all the Google users can expect more paid advertising links in their results. Don't be afraid to color outside of the lines, drones.
well, its a joke, but its wrong. Google is availible in: Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bihari Bork, bork, bork! Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Cambodian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Elmer Fudd English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Guarani Gujarati Hacker Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Interlingua Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Klingon Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Laothian Latin Latvian Lingala Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Malayalam Maltese Marathi Moldavian Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) Occitan Oriya Pashto Persian Pig Latin Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Punjabi Quechua Romanian Romansh Russian Scots Gaelic Serbian Serbo-Croatian Sesotho Shona Sindhi Sinhalese Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tigrinya Tonga Turkish Turkmen Twi Uighur Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu
i have yet to see google provide search results based on customer payment like you describe. sidebar ads, and top advertisements i've seen, but search results? Those are based on links to the source by other pages on the internet. that's how Google bombing worked. remember when "weapons of mass destruction" searches resulted in http://mist.xvand.com/humor/weapons.html? or when searches for "a miserable failure" turned up president bush's whitehouse.gov biography? They have since fixed this to prevent spamming, and user modification of search results. (however not entirely: "french milltary victories" still sends you to: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html ) Do you have some sort of source for your suggestion that Google is corrupt, other than the fact that they're making money? Feature wise, Google does support boolean, excluding xor. i can think of nothing you'd want a search engine to do involving xoring terms. Nested search is possible with just a little creativity, (no "search within results" option required) "'original search' new search terms" (which is exactly what that button would do anyway.) Link searches do have to be exact, yes, but... how would they not be? You're searching for sites who have linked "here" what reason would you have for making "here" change? You can, however, be nonspecific. searching for links to your domain name, for instance, or your subdomain.domain, or even some folder structure below it without specifying a file. If that isn't enough, then maybe your issue is with your folder structure, not the "Link:" option. The other features are convenience for stupid users, not some sort of search engine scandal, however they don't happen without your knowledge, they tell you right above the search results. The more Google hacks you read, the more you notice the quiet power behind Google. I'd seriously like to know where you get the idea that Google is bad and evil. Do you use a search engine that you believe to be better?
