I'm Only as Smart as Google Allows Me to Be
One of my fellow Telligenti (Michael Kelley) had this as his Windows Live Messenger tagline for the past few days: "I'm only as smart as Google." Each time I looked at my contact list in WLM I stopped and reflected on that tagline. For me, it holds many truths. People who know me tease me about my propensity for Googling anything and everything. I admit it: I am a Google addict.
A few months ago I signed up for Google Web History, just out of curiosity, since I am such an avid Google user. Taking a look at my trends, over the past 7 days I've performed 178 Google searches. Over the past 30 days I've performed 654 searches. Wow, that's a lot of searching. The Top Sites I've landed on in the past 30 days?
- en.wikipedia.org
- www.microsoft.com
- www.amazon.com
- weboggle.shackworks.com
- blogs.msdn.com
- www.ratebeer.com
- msdn2.microsoft.com
- msdn.microsoft.com
- www.digitalcamerainfo.com
- weblogs.asp.net
Google has helped me with decisions regarding the care of my children, purchase of a cell phone, interview preparation, cooking, programming questions, telephone numbers, slang translation, urban myth identification, vacation planning, my website theme, lyrics of songs stuck in my head, and a million other things. It's settled arguments, generated arguments, and provided information.
Just last week my son participated in his Cub Scout pack's Pinewood Derby. While there my husband and I were speaking with another parent about car designs, and we mentioned that the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile would be a fun design to do. The other parent said something along the lines of "yeah, but the trouble is finding out exactly what it's supposed to look like". Wha?? My friend Google can tell me within 10 seconds what the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile should look like. It can also show me what some previous Wienermobile entries in the Pinewood Derby looked like. (Oh, and as an aside, as I was Googling to find out the correct spelling of "wiener", I came across this advertisement blast from the past: "My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R.")
Obviously with an average of over 20 Google searches per day, Google is a big part of my life. I can't imagine not having knowledge at literally my fingertips. What did they do in the olden days? People trekked to the local public library for information. I remember in grade school learning about the file of periodical and newspaper clippings that the librarians kept, where you could try to look up information about recent events and topics. This was a literal file of scissor-clipped articles from newspapers and magazines. OK, perhaps I am showing my age here, but this was in the 70's. Can you even imagine that now? With Google News I have instant access to over 4500 news sources.
It's amazing to me that I get all of this for free. Don't tell them, but I'd be willing to pay for the service. I get way more out of it than my YMCA membership.
Yes, I'm only as smart as Google allows me to be. And that's pretty damned smart. :-)
