MattMaroon.com

I think the one thing about Google that has changed about us that we don’t even realize is that it has given us many of the benefits of omniscience without the any of the drawbacks.

For instance, a month or so ago I was at Whole Foods and saw some raw shrimp. I’d never cooked shrimp myself before, though I’ve certainly eaten my share of it, and I was curious what it would taste like. Back in 1990 figuring that out would have been laborious, even excluding the fact that I would have been 10 years old. Maybe I would have picked up some of the shrimp and then set about calling the women in my family until I came across one who had done it before. Now I just throw it in the cart knowing full well that when I get home I’ll be able to figure out what to do with it in under a minute. It turned out to be the best cocktail shrimp I’d ever had.

More recently I was looking at counter tops because we’re thinking of redoing the kitchen. Previously I might have gone to a store and asked the employee about the benefits of Corian vs. granite or whatever else. And the answer I got might not have been entirely dishonest, but it probably would have steered me toward whichever was higher markup. Whether the salesman was on commission or, in the case of Lowe’s, worked for a company that was, somewhere along the line someone would have an incentive to ensure that I was being pushed into the material that was most profitable for the seller rather than the one that fit my needs.

But now I just note the prices in my head (I don’t have to write them down because if I forget, I’ll just Google them) and then go home and get unbiased information. Turns out granite is superior in almost every respect, other than it comes in fewer colors, costs a little more, and requires sealing. But you can drop a hot pan on it like it’s hot, and I like the idea of having countertops that are over 1 billion years old, so I think it’s going to win.

Writing something for a blog or a paper and need facts or historical precedent? Google it. Want to know why there are interstate highways in Hawaii? Google it. Want directions to somewhere you’ve never been before? Google it. Want to know when Arby’s closes, because you’re up late and don’t want to eat Subway and contribute to the world’s overpopulation of Jared Fogles? (One is clearly too many.) Google it. Want to know who won the Bengals game? Google it. Or just guess the opponent, and you’ll probably be right because the Bengals suck.

I even use Google as a grammar check, or a spell checker for proper nouns that Word doesn’t recognize. Sometimes I’m unsure if something should be hyphenated or not, so I just type it in and see what pops up.

I have to think that true omniscience would be depressing. I have a long-held theory that no two people could ever be friends if they knew everything the other thought. (Wait, should long-held be hyphenated there? Let me Google it. Yep.) And I can’t even imagine how horrible the rest of the world would be if you knew everything about it. But with Google, you only get the information you want, when you want it. And the stuff that you think you want but don’t really, Google doesn’t even know.

In fairness, I shouldn’t chalk it all up to Google. We were half way there before it. But there’s a big difference between half way there and all the way. Access to information encourages more information to be accessed. There wouldn’t be anywhere near as many blogs as there are now without good search, for instance, because nobody would find them. Wikipedia would be a fraction of what it is today if it wasn’t in the top 3 results any time you query a proper noun.

I probably could have figured out how to cook the shrimp in 1999 using Yahoo. But how to make that awesome potato side dish I had at Flemings? No way. But here‘s what my first Google search turned up. And whoever put it there probably only did so because they know that, via Google, someone could actually find it.

And this is why I think that it’s going to be a long time before the “next Google” comes along. It’s fundamentally changed the way we use the internet. It started a self-perpetuating cycle of free information that persists even today. Nothing on the horizon promises this. Something will come along, it’s inevitable, but we I don’t think we’ll see it coming, the same way we didn’t see Google.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out what to do with these escargots I bought.

This entry was posted on May 17, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under tech . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.