10 ms·

I Google everything

154 points by wernah 14y ago

antonioevans 14y ago
I tell people all the time.. "Do you remember when you could bullshit anyone." Now they just type your BS into their smart phone.
- jgroome 14y ago
  It was a simpler time. You could misinform just about anybody about anything. Yoko Ono? Sure, her influence in the Beatles would arguably ruin them forever, but after John Lennon's death she went on to invent Skittles. It's an art now though. You have to pick little tidbits that SOUND plausible but you can never really verify. I, for example, told my (American) flatmate months ago that no living person other than current sitting monarch can appear on a British postage stamp. Had to backtrack when the Royal Mail announced every British gold medal winner at London 2012 would get their own stamp.
  - parenthesis 14y ago
    According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the... what you said did used to be approximately correct.
- squonk 14y ago
  Implies that conversations will no longer center on facts. Will we find ourselves talking more about politics, love, art and philosophy?
  - zevyoura 14y ago
    It seems to me that it implies conversations will center around truths (or at least googled tidbits) rather than assumptions.
- lupatus 14y ago
  Pre-seed google with your BS and SEO it to page 1.
- Tooluka 14y ago
  Now they just type your BS into their smart phone... ... and click "Save" :) It's unbelievable how many "facts" nowadays lead to some lone blog or wiki article with no references.
manaskarekar 14y ago
Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man pages. Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below. Thanks, I'll look into those.
- waterhouse 14y ago
  > I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l <recursion depth limit>" to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.
  - damncabbage 14y ago
    Please don't do this; Wikipedia provides dumps for exactly this purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Eng... (Further explanation regarding the use of robots, spiders and 'wget -m' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Please_do_not_use_a_web_crawler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Ple... )
- marban 14y ago
  http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.
danso 14y ago
> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit. > Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error. I don't even know how com sci algorithm courses pose a challenge anymore. Google was barely a thing when I took it and when we occasionally stumbled on obscure papers with it (or Excite), it was like finding the teacher's answer book out in the open. > Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were up to. This is not such a loss. I think back when you had to call people, your conversations had to be more deliberate (i.e. I'm calling Jane to break up with her/give condolences about her dead mother) and planned. Not planned out in what you were going to say, necessarily, but planned out in that you wouldn't just call up a non-close friend and have a lengthy conversation with them. Whereas with online chat and Facebook, I've had long rewarding conversations with people whom I may never had the temerity to cold-call about anything.
- corin_ 14y ago
  "Talking shit" can mean exactly the same thing as "talking bullshit", in the UK at least.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - freehunter 14y ago
    In the US, talking shit means saying something negative about someone. John said I stole money from him? He's just talking shit. This could include truths; perhaps I did take his money, but there's more to the story than John mentioned. John paid me money for a service I performed but he thought it wasn't worth what he paid. John said I'm a cheat when I beat him in poker, but that was just the way the cards fell. He's talking shit about me again. Talking bullshit would mean knowingly lying. John paid me for a service I told him I could perform, but I was bullshitting him when I said that. I can't actually perform the service. The mayor campaigned on lower taxes, but he knew he wouldn't be able to change that law.
droob 14y ago
When you hold a bunch of information in your head, you benefit from your brain's penchant for making weird collisions and connections. Serendipity rules.
bcl 14y ago
The ability to 'Google it' does not mean you have the ability to understand it. There is a difference between looking up Jeopardy facts and building a fundamental understanding of the subject and being able to discuss it, or build upon it to come up with new ideas.
cliveholloway 14y ago
These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy. eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression". You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.
- mseebach 14y ago
  > If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression". And then you've got two problems :) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%20parsing https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...
- Wingman4l7 14y ago
  See my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410649 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410649
jhull 14y ago
"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error." I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.
repoman 14y ago
Is it bad? No. Is it acceptable? No. Where is the line? It's okay to spend your whole day trying to get tutorials out of Google because the documentation sucks or you just have no idea how the f you can start with that idea. But you must be able to digest them effectively and extends those tutorials beyond just tutorials, and make something out of them. Otherwise, if you just reuse tutorial codes from top to bottom everywhere, then you are not learning. You are copying.
Codhisattva 14y ago
The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.
uncoder0 14y ago
Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the text.
- wernah 14y ago
  Thanks mate, i'll check it out
poblano 14y ago
The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ
edanm 14y ago
Great article. A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out. And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.
- vecinu 14y ago
  Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.
  - jcoder 14y ago
    That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly. They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
  - dagw 14y ago
    For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.
    - alexfoo 14y ago
      That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source. It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge. Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).
CodeCube 14y ago
The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a mass fleecing of a generation.
- PakG1 14y ago
  There are trolls on Twitter who make it their mission to make big media fall for big-ass lies, like the death of heads of state, etc.
- derleth 14y ago
  Whatever you do, never look up Velikovsky or Von Däniken. It will shatter your ideal image of the pre-Internet era as one when idiotic nonsense didn't spread.
rubidium 14y ago
The stuff that can be looked up on Google constitutes a very small sub-set of the interesting things to know about the world, because a vast majority of knowledge doesn't exist yet (e.g. google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example). The Einstein quote is a perfect case-in-point. He didn't memorize the stuff in books, but he also didn't spend his life looking up stuff in books (modern translation : the internet). Make and invent people. It's much more fun than gooyouface.
- kilburn 14y ago
  > google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example ... and then you switch to google scholar ;)
  - rubidium 14y ago
    Which stops being helpful after year 4 : )
tyler_ball 14y ago
I have friends that don't even type URLs anymore, they just type 'youtube' into google every time and click the first result.
- dean 14y ago
  Yes. I have seen this a lot with friends and co-workers. They always google the site instead of typing in the URL or even creating a bookmark. Even for sites they go to 20 times a day. Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The person just gave me a blank stare.
- PakG1 14y ago
  That is crazy. I thought that was behaviour reserved for people my dad's age. My dad does that all the time. I tried to teach him what a URL is, I don't think he got it.
- dripton 14y ago
  Now that some browsers have merged the URL bar with the web search bar, you will end up doing this whether you want to or not. And even if it's obviously a URL rather than a search term, Chrome (by default) sends every URL you type to google.com for autocomplete. (For the ten minutes between when I found this feature and I found out how to disable it, I was really angry at Google.)
Claudus 14y ago
I'm a free thinker. I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form within documented knowledge... Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes). And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files. Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.
- illuminate 14y ago
  All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge. There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.
  - Claudus 14y ago
    What a nonsensical comment. > All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge. What? First, sophistry, has little to do with anything I wrote. Second, I'm most certainly endorsing knowledge. > There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Really? Do you have little slots for them on your spice rack? Logic and facts are the fabric of reality. This a comment I'd expect from someone desperately wanting to be right despite being pathologically wrong. > Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out. How was I focusing on one? Logic and facts are complimentary, and even if you somehow exclusively focused on one, how would that lead to extreme open-mindedness? And how is being open-minded bad? (You are also misusing the "being so open-minded their brain falls out" quote which is meant to meant to convey that you should be open-minded [good] but not foolishly accepting of poorly formulated ideas [bad]) What do you even mean by this comment? It is nonsense. I think you read my comment, self identify as a hipster or "bullshitter", had an emotional response of wanting to retort and instead wrote a post that illustrated one of my points.
K2h 14y ago
I know taking issue with Einstien is not a good idea - but I'll do it anyway. Learning - and putting as much relevent material in your working memory is beneficial to seeing the bigger picture and quick informed decisions. A collection of one line facts (what you get when you look something up) does not make wisdom. Sure, most of us have extremely small working memories, but it does not negate the benefit for learning and retaining material on a subject. as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and... every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.
- diminoten 14y ago
  This is a great point and can't be understated. When you're in a meeting or conversing with someone who just knows things, the conversation moves so very much faster than if you have to guess or be vague due to a lack of knowledge. I Google like crazy for answers about things, but I consider not knowing a failure on my part, and endeavor to learn the thing I had to google, so I don't have to "fail" again. I think everyone should think of this problem in a similar way, lest we fall into a habit of saying whatever we want and assuming we'll be corrected if we're wrong (or some other ill).
- DanBC 14y ago
  Feynman makes a good point when he's describing why he isn't a genius. Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something) and everyone says "wow". It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered a lot of it. I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some interesting characteristic.
  - bandy 14y ago
    With a very possible "interesting characteristic" being the measurements of the lady who answered the phone.
njharman 14y ago
That (externalizing our memory) has been ongoing for long time. Going back in time; Computerized searching, Indexes, Libraries, Books, Written language, probably something like counting stones in pre-history. I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it (search time/connection speed). It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom must be fought for.
Tycho 14y ago
The only thing comparable to Google searching is Twitteer search. Case in point: this morning after reading the sad news of director Tony Scott's death, I inevitable felt morbidly curious about what the circumstances or motivations might have been. Plenty of other people will too, so eventually it will find it's way into the press, but only after days or maybe weeks. So, I opened Twitter on my iPad and searched for 'Tony Scott rumours' and there was the likely answer among the first few results. Of course it was only unconfirmed conjecture but enough to satisfy my curiosity so I wouldn't spend any more time thinking about the event. Tweets are more instant and just more human IMO. It means you can better leverage your understanding of human behaviour when you try to search for things.
hadronzoo 14y ago
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus
prophetjohn 14y ago
As a side note, your blog looks very nice, but is unusable on a Nexus 7 in portrait mode.
elorant 14y ago
filetype:pdf has been my secret weapon. I use it like fifty times a week looking for white papers, case studies, etc for various subjects. The wealth of information hidden in these little gems is invaluable.
elliottkember 14y ago
I hate this fact. Not because the internet is in peril of going down, or because it's not convenient (of course it is) - but because we're confusing access to information with knowledge. Access to information will tell you a number, or an answer, or even give you an amount of text about something. But knowledge lets you understand the bigger picture - how something came to be, or why. At some point we become the needle on the gramophone, rather than the record. All we can say is what we've heard or read. It's the opposite of thinking, and it makes me worry.
- jedbrown 14y ago
  Trivia is not useful knowledge in today's world. The most important thing is problem formulation. Once you have figured out the right question to ask, answering it is usually easy.
  - Wingman4l7 14y ago
    This is why I'm so fascinated with Vernor Vinge's "wearables" future, and why I think parts of it are such an accurate representation of the near future. For instance, high schools have classes called "Search and Analysis" -- basically advanced Googling & result interpretation. People have recognized that the ability to formulate the proper query is almost as important as being able to understand the results. Check out his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High[1] and the short Synthetic Serendipity[2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Fast_Times_at_Fairmont_High http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor... [2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...
jsavimbi 14y ago
> Shit-talking in the pub. I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up. What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops talking to me. For good.
wazoox 14y ago
Memory is an essential, invaluable tool to support knowledge. Knowledge isn't an accumulation of facts, and it's important to chain them into coherent ensembles to be able to understand them, therefore training and enhancing intelligence. I both try to remember everything of significance (NOT factoids, or phone numbers) AND google everything. This is absolutely not contradictory.
bwang29 14y ago
Very interesting read. It makes me wonder if it is all about access time and the complexity of the query, then to what extent could "Google everything" be able to outsource our brain space?
__abc 14y ago
Anyone else hit 'command + w' to see what it does to then have the damn window exit on them ..... ARGH!!!! :)
Karunamon 14y ago
Who's the overly-PC type who removed the "fucking" from the title that was originally here?
D9u 14y ago
The OP should Google "@viewport" so his site can be accessible to mobile devices.
Skillset 14y ago
I also like to Google everything, even individual words or proper names I already know the meaning of, just because I can. I use the Google Dictionary Extension for Chrome. Just double-click anything on the web and it pops up. Pretty awesome stuff. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboac...
agumonkey 14y ago
I personally etymonline.com everything.. root fetishist.
arcand 14y ago
I stopped reading as soon as I saw he listened to lenny kravitz
naavinm 14y ago
Great article.
kruk 14y ago
A year ago there was a study conducted on that topic: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.: http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory
greggman 14y ago
I find this similar to the math vs arithmetic issue. Math is not arithmetic. We used to have to spend a lot of time on arithmetic to do math. Now we skip the arithmetic since a calculator or computer can do it leaving us free to do the fun and interesting part, math Similarly, we used to have to wonder about simple facts. Now though simple facts are at our finger tips leaving us to move directly to the deeper more interesting topics.

154 points by wernah 14y ago

I tell people all the time.. "Do you remember when you could bullshit anyone." Now they just type your BS into their smart phone.

jgroome 14y ago
It was a simpler time. You could misinform just about anybody about anything. Yoko Ono? Sure, her influence in the Beatles would arguably ruin them forever, but after John Lennon's death she went on to invent Skittles. It's an art now though. You have to pick little tidbits that SOUND plausible but you can never really verify. I, for example, told my (American) flatmate months ago that no living person other than current sitting monarch can appear on a British postage stamp. Had to backtrack when the Royal Mail announced every British gold medal winner at London 2012 would get their own stamp.
- parenthesis 14y ago
  According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the... what you said did used to be approximately correct.
squonk 14y ago
Implies that conversations will no longer center on facts. Will we find ourselves talking more about politics, love, art and philosophy?
- zevyoura 14y ago
  It seems to me that it implies conversations will center around truths (or at least googled tidbits) rather than assumptions.
lupatus 14y ago
Pre-seed google with your BS and SEO it to page 1.
Tooluka 14y ago
Now they just type your BS into their smart phone... ... and click "Save" :) It's unbelievable how many "facts" nowadays lead to some lone blog or wiki article with no references.

manaskarekar 14y ago

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man pages. Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below. Thanks, I'll look into those.

waterhouse 14y ago
> I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l <recursion depth limit>" to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.
- damncabbage 14y ago
  Please don't do this; Wikipedia provides dumps for exactly this purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Eng... (Further explanation regarding the use of robots, spiders and 'wget -m' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Please_do_not_use_a_web_crawler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Ple... )
marban 14y ago
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.

danso 14y ago

> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit. > Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error. I don't even know how com sci algorithm courses pose a challenge anymore. Google was barely a thing when I took it and when we occasionally stumbled on obscure papers with it (or Excite), it was like finding the teacher's answer book out in the open. > Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were up to. This is not such a loss. I think back when you had to call people, your conversations had to be more deliberate (i.e. I'm calling Jane to break up with her/give condolences about her dead mother) and planned. Not planned out in what you were going to say, necessarily, but planned out in that you wouldn't just call up a non-close friend and have a lengthy conversation with them. Whereas with online chat and Facebook, I've had long rewarding conversations with people whom I may never had the temerity to cold-call about anything.

corin_ 14y ago
"Talking shit" can mean exactly the same thing as "talking bullshit", in the UK at least.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- freehunter 14y ago
  In the US, talking shit means saying something negative about someone. John said I stole money from him? He's just talking shit. This could include truths; perhaps I did take his money, but there's more to the story than John mentioned. John paid me money for a service I performed but he thought it wasn't worth what he paid. John said I'm a cheat when I beat him in poker, but that was just the way the cards fell. He's talking shit about me again. Talking bullshit would mean knowingly lying. John paid me for a service I told him I could perform, but I was bullshitting him when I said that. I can't actually perform the service. The mayor campaigned on lower taxes, but he knew he wouldn't be able to change that law.

droob 14y ago

When you hold a bunch of information in your head, you benefit from your brain's penchant for making weird collisions and connections. Serendipity rules.

bcl 14y ago

The ability to 'Google it' does not mean you have the ability to understand it. There is a difference between looking up Jeopardy facts and building a fundamental understanding of the subject and being able to discuss it, or build upon it to come up with new ideas.

cliveholloway 14y ago

These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy. eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression". You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.

mseebach 14y ago
> If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression". And then you've got two problems :) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%20parsing https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...
Wingman4l7 14y ago
See my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410649 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4410649

jhull 14y ago

"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error." I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.

repoman 14y ago

Is it bad? No. Is it acceptable? No. Where is the line? It's okay to spend your whole day trying to get tutorials out of Google because the documentation sucks or you just have no idea how the f you can start with that idea. But you must be able to digest them effectively and extends those tutorials beyond just tutorials, and make something out of them. Otherwise, if you just reuse tutorial codes from top to bottom everywhere, then you are not learning. You are copying.

Codhisattva 14y ago

The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.

uncoder0 14y ago

Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the text.

wernah 14y ago
Thanks mate, i'll check it out

poblano 14y ago

The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

edanm 14y ago

Great article. A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out. And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

vecinu 14y ago
Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.
- jcoder 14y ago
  That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly. They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
- dagw 14y ago
  For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.
  - alexfoo 14y ago
    That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source. It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge. Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).

CodeCube 14y ago

The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a mass fleecing of a generation.

PakG1 14y ago
There are trolls on Twitter who make it their mission to make big media fall for big-ass lies, like the death of heads of state, etc.
derleth 14y ago
Whatever you do, never look up Velikovsky or Von Däniken. It will shatter your ideal image of the pre-Internet era as one when idiotic nonsense didn't spread.

rubidium 14y ago

The stuff that can be looked up on Google constitutes a very small sub-set of the interesting things to know about the world, because a vast majority of knowledge doesn't exist yet (e.g. google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example). The Einstein quote is a perfect case-in-point. He didn't memorize the stuff in books, but he also didn't spend his life looking up stuff in books (modern translation : the internet). Make and invent people. It's much more fun than gooyouface.

kilburn 14y ago
> google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example ... and then you switch to google scholar ;)
- rubidium 14y ago
  Which stops being helpful after year 4 : )

tyler_ball 14y ago

I have friends that don't even type URLs anymore, they just type 'youtube' into google every time and click the first result.

dean 14y ago
Yes. I have seen this a lot with friends and co-workers. They always google the site instead of typing in the URL or even creating a bookmark. Even for sites they go to 20 times a day. Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The person just gave me a blank stare.
PakG1 14y ago
That is crazy. I thought that was behaviour reserved for people my dad's age. My dad does that all the time. I tried to teach him what a URL is, I don't think he got it.
dripton 14y ago
Now that some browsers have merged the URL bar with the web search bar, you will end up doing this whether you want to or not. And even if it's obviously a URL rather than a search term, Chrome (by default) sends every URL you type to google.com for autocomplete. (For the ten minutes between when I found this feature and I found out how to disable it, I was really angry at Google.)

Claudus 14y ago

I'm a free thinker. I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form within documented knowledge... Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes). And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files. Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.

illuminate 14y ago
All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge. There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.
- Claudus 14y ago
  What a nonsensical comment. > All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge. What? First, sophistry, has little to do with anything I wrote. Second, I'm most certainly endorsing knowledge. > There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Really? Do you have little slots for them on your spice rack? Logic and facts are the fabric of reality. This a comment I'd expect from someone desperately wanting to be right despite being pathologically wrong. > Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out. How was I focusing on one? Logic and facts are complimentary, and even if you somehow exclusively focused on one, how would that lead to extreme open-mindedness? And how is being open-minded bad? (You are also misusing the "being so open-minded their brain falls out" quote which is meant to meant to convey that you should be open-minded [good] but not foolishly accepting of poorly formulated ideas [bad]) What do you even mean by this comment? It is nonsense. I think you read my comment, self identify as a hipster or "bullshitter", had an emotional response of wanting to retort and instead wrote a post that illustrated one of my points.

K2h 14y ago

I know taking issue with Einstien is not a good idea - but I'll do it anyway. Learning - and putting as much relevent material in your working memory is beneficial to seeing the bigger picture and quick informed decisions. A collection of one line facts (what you get when you look something up) does not make wisdom. Sure, most of us have extremely small working memories, but it does not negate the benefit for learning and retaining material on a subject. as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and... every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.

diminoten 14y ago
This is a great point and can't be understated. When you're in a meeting or conversing with someone who just knows things, the conversation moves so very much faster than if you have to guess or be vague due to a lack of knowledge. I Google like crazy for answers about things, but I consider not knowing a failure on my part, and endeavor to learn the thing I had to google, so I don't have to "fail" again. I think everyone should think of this problem in a similar way, lest we fall into a habit of saying whatever we want and assuming we'll be corrected if we're wrong (or some other ill).
DanBC 14y ago
Feynman makes a good point when he's describing why he isn't a genius. Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something) and everyone says "wow". It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered a lot of it. I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some interesting characteristic.
- bandy 14y ago
  With a very possible "interesting characteristic" being the measurements of the lady who answered the phone.

njharman 14y ago

That (externalizing our memory) has been ongoing for long time. Going back in time; Computerized searching, Indexes, Libraries, Books, Written language, probably something like counting stones in pre-history. I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it (search time/connection speed). It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom must be fought for.

Tycho 14y ago

The only thing comparable to Google searching is Twitteer search. Case in point: this morning after reading the sad news of director Tony Scott's death, I inevitable felt morbidly curious about what the circumstances or motivations might have been. Plenty of other people will too, so eventually it will find it's way into the press, but only after days or maybe weeks. So, I opened Twitter on my iPad and searched for 'Tony Scott rumours' and there was the likely answer among the first few results. Of course it was only unconfirmed conjecture but enough to satisfy my curiosity so I wouldn't spend any more time thinking about the event. Tweets are more instant and just more human IMO. It means you can better leverage your understanding of human behaviour when you try to search for things.

hadronzoo 14y ago

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus

prophetjohn 14y ago

As a side note, your blog looks very nice, but is unusable on a Nexus 7 in portrait mode.

elorant 14y ago

filetype:pdf has been my secret weapon. I use it like fifty times a week looking for white papers, case studies, etc for various subjects. The wealth of information hidden in these little gems is invaluable.

elliottkember 14y ago

I hate this fact. Not because the internet is in peril of going down, or because it's not convenient (of course it is) - but because we're confusing access to information with knowledge. Access to information will tell you a number, or an answer, or even give you an amount of text about something. But knowledge lets you understand the bigger picture - how something came to be, or why. At some point we become the needle on the gramophone, rather than the record. All we can say is what we've heard or read. It's the opposite of thinking, and it makes me worry.

jedbrown 14y ago
Trivia is not useful knowledge in today's world. The most important thing is problem formulation. Once you have figured out the right question to ask, answering it is usually easy.
- Wingman4l7 14y ago
  This is why I'm so fascinated with Vernor Vinge's "wearables" future, and why I think parts of it are such an accurate representation of the near future. For instance, high schools have classes called "Search and Analysis" -- basically advanced Googling & result interpretation. People have recognized that the ability to formulate the proper query is almost as important as being able to understand the results. Check out his short story Fast Times At Fairmont High[1] and the short Synthetic Serendipity[2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Fast_Times_at_Fairmont_High http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor... [2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...

jsavimbi 14y ago

> Shit-talking in the pub. I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up. What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops talking to me. For good.

wazoox 14y ago

Memory is an essential, invaluable tool to support knowledge. Knowledge isn't an accumulation of facts, and it's important to chain them into coherent ensembles to be able to understand them, therefore training and enhancing intelligence. I both try to remember everything of significance (NOT factoids, or phone numbers) AND google everything. This is absolutely not contradictory.

bwang29 14y ago

Very interesting read. It makes me wonder if it is all about access time and the complexity of the query, then to what extent could "Google everything" be able to outsource our brain space?

__abc 14y ago

Anyone else hit 'command + w' to see what it does to then have the damn window exit on them ..... ARGH!!!! :)

Karunamon 14y ago

Who's the overly-PC type who removed the "fucking" from the title that was originally here?

D9u 14y ago

The OP should Google "@viewport" so his site can be accessible to mobile devices.

Skillset 14y ago

I also like to Google everything, even individual words or proper names I already know the meaning of, just because I can. I use the Google Dictionary Extension for Chrome. Just double-click anything on the web and it pops up. Pretty awesome stuff. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboac...

agumonkey 14y ago

I personally etymonline.com everything.. root fetishist.

arcand 14y ago

I stopped reading as soon as I saw he listened to lenny kravitz

naavinm 14y ago

Great article.

kruk 14y ago

A year ago there was a study conducted on that topic: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.: http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory

greggman 14y ago

I find this similar to the math vs arithmetic issue. Math is not arithmetic. We used to have to spend a lot of time on arithmetic to do math. Now we skip the arithmetic since a calculator or computer can do it leaving us free to do the fun and interesting part, math Similarly, we used to have to wonder about simple facts. Now though simple facts are at our finger tips leaving us to move directly to the deeper more interesting topics.