Google is a successful company employing a lot of smart people. They made over $4 billion in earnings off of $16 billion in revenue last year. They continue to enjoy a growing share of the search engine market.
Is Google so Smart that it Makes You Stupid?
Nicholas Carr at the Atlantic Online asks that question. As google does the work of the mind, he sees changes going on inside of his brain:
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. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.
Most would agree that using google to save time during research is a good thing, but perhaps it is taking something important away. I wrote a piece earlier in a similar vein touching on the fact that reliance on GPS navigation devices may lead to a loss of navigational skill.
Or Is Google Stupid?
Yesterday I wrote a piece touching on some problems with Google Maps. Compared to Google Search, Google Maps is a newer feature and it will likely continue to improve over time. Google Search remains the hallmark service offered by Google.
In addition to search, however, Google is also known as a leader in online advertising. The Low-Tech Times signed up for Google Adsense as a source of advertising revenue. Google Adsense scans the content of web pages and places relevant ads on the page. Sometimes it appears to work fairly well. Other times, the results are not ideal.
For example, I wrote a post on this anti-gadget blog slamming a robotic lawnmower and recommending low-tech grass cutting methods instead. Google Adsense placed ads directly below the post for:
- Robotic Lawnmowers and
- Gadgets for Men
Is that smart? Perhaps humans might be able to do a better job than Google’s algorithms.