Lost without searching?

We have come to a stage where we are all excessively dependent on search engines — whether it's a pasta recipe or your doctor's analysis, finds Reshma Krishnamurthy Sharma

April 01, 2012 06:23 pm | Updated November 16, 2021 11:31 am IST

As the Internet has become an integral part of our lives, we are now using the Web space for work, correspondence and social networking. One product of the Internet, the search engine, has become so essential that most urban users cannot think of alternative tools.

Why do we use search engines? Because it offers instant answers to whatever we ask? The World Wide Web is a huge resource, and a search engine organises the information we are looking for, whether it is a question of etiquette or resume writing, or where to watch a movie, in any form we like.

Amrita S., a homemaker pregnant with her second baby, says she uses Google and Yahoo to learn more about parenting, recipes and just plain news. “Google or any other prominent search engine ensures I am very much updated on world happenings. Moreover I do find would-be mothers or anyone who wants to know anything that a doctor has said will definitely search for that condition, therapies and medicines available and how to tackle it.”

How dependent are people becoming on search engines? For Priyanka, a class 12 student, searching is an inevitable part of her life. She looks for information on a host of topics, whether the musician or lyricist of a song she liked on the radio or in-depth analysis of a subject that has been explained in class that day.

With many websites, including search engines as part of their page, people feel search engine information is trustworthy and presented as though a friend has shared it with them. Says civil engineer Akhila Haranahalli, “I use it mostly to learn more about anything from a pasta recipe, to why a certain friend's platelet count went up. It helps as a source of reference pictures for sketching. Yes, it is fast and gives one information about almost everything under the sun. Also, the content is trustworthy and if someone mentions something that I have no clue about, I quickly do a search and update my knowledge about it.”

Do search engines encourage students to use shortcuts? Rishabh, a class 10 student, says he is so used to Googling — when he has to look for background material for his projects, the latest wallpapers, or anything on teenage issues — that he finds it hard to manage without it even for a day. He adds that searching on the Net has made life easier for him in completing his homework or projects and that's what gets him hooked on to search tools.

Entrepreneur and techie Sheshgiri Kamath explains how search engines became inevitable. “Search engines are a means to an end, the end here being getting information. They do make the process of getting information infinitely easier and efficient than what we did in the past. However, even if they did not exist, our need for information would always exist and the human brain would have come up with alternative ways to get this information. This could be reading, travelling or something else altogether.”

What is revolutionary is the way they now work, he says. “Search giants are already mapping our search behaviour, which enables them to show customised search results, based on our online behaviour. This is like them knowing what is going on in our head and it is simply amazing. We are already living a future, where we are being given answers, even before we can finish asking our questions. It remains to be seen just what form search engines will take in the future. ”

John Battelle in his book “The Search” states that every day millions upon millions of people lean forward into their computer screens and pour their wants, fears and intentions into Google.

That human input is what is making this phenomenon something different from the kinds of research we used to carry out. “Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous and significant cultural artefact in the history of humankind: the database of intentions.”

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