Thursday, March 05, 2009

What are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Once upon a time, there existed a type of person: the uber-Googler. The experts in manipulating booleans and synonymical tenses to extract the most obscure pieces of information from the internet. As the art form grew so did the realisation that logic operators were much too complex for the other 98.3% of the internet-browsing population and the average vocabulary size is only about 6,000 words (and declining), so the smart search engines reacted accordingly and got dumber.

Now the average Joe merely has to find a Google box and enter their question exactly: how to tape an ankle, how to grow weed, how to build a nuclear reactor. And in the event you struggle to frame your query, the field will come up with suggestions for you:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think of Google as a powerful extension of the mind, not a replacement....

Ash said...

I think it's all but replaced mine. sigh.

The Ruud said...

I believe wikipedia is the bigger evil here.