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Over at Clive Thompson's interesting blog Collision Detection, there's a post on the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which finds that two-thirds of Americans feel they could stop using Internet search engines entirely without much change to their lives. I like Thompson's reply: "During the workday, I use search engines several times an hour -- and for several extended periods during the day I'll be doing queries several times a minute. If I were to average it out, I'd say I probably do a search every 15 minutes while I'm at work at my desk. Obviously, I skew pretty far off to the side of the bell-shaped curve here because I'm a) a journalist, b) a technology journalist, c) a blogger, and d) someone who regards the Internet, functionally, as a part of my consciousness. Search engines aren't merely the way I find information: They're part of my basic thought processes." Hear hear. (The number of Google searches I do while writing an average Imaginary Year entry would probably surprise people, and I'm currently working on a set of projects that use Google even more fundamentally, sort of in the style of flarf, only minus the comedy.) The comments thread on Thompson's post is full of people praising Google and talking about the usual signs of Google overuse (using it as a spell-checker, etc.), but I also found this comment on "the changing nature of the Web" to also be insightful: "An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks [...] The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now." Labels: internet, technology
Friday, February 11, 2005
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