
I Google everything - wernah
http://wernah.com/2012/03/i-fucking-google-everything/
======
edanm
Great article.

A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm
the only person who _actually_ Googles everything. When I sit down to have a
conversation with most people, and questions about _facts_ come up, I
instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer
to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece,
rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.

And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

~~~
dagw
_And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it,
actually._

I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying
to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google
it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a
few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like
someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours
having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like
I actually care about what the population of Greece is.

~~~
vibrunazo
That's interesting. I didn't know people would think like that. Your post
explains a lot, now the world makes much more sense. Thanks for posting it :)

Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only
interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution"
before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing
wasted for nothing.

I mean, nothing wrong with finding it fun to discuss. But I wish I could
accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person
who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.

Well, anyway, already learned something new today. My day is complete.

edit: wow this is bigger than I thought, now I've been reading through older
HN posts where I was mind-blown about "why would he even post that? What's his
motivation?". Now I feel like I can finally make sense out of it. I feel so
stupid for never noticing something so simple. The world is different now.

~~~
cinch
"Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only
interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution"
before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing
wasted for nothing."

there's many things that get expressed "between the lines". arguing for the
fun of it has benefits. for one, ideas get exchanged, validated and who knows:
maybe something useful comes out of it.

~~~
skanuj
Arguing an idea vs arguing a fact are different things. ("Reply" is meant to
bring the comment in right thread, not to counter the previous comment)

------
rubidium
The stuff that can be looked up on Google constitutes a very small sub-set of
the interesting things to know about the world, because a vast majority of
knowledge doesn't exist yet (e.g. google stops being regularly helpful after
year 2 of a PhD, for example). The Einstein quote is a perfect case-in-point.
He didn't memorize the stuff in books, but he also didn't spend his life
looking up stuff in books (modern translation : the internet). Make and invent
people. It's much more fun than gooyouface.

~~~
kilburn

      > google stops being regularly helpful after year 2 of a PhD, for example
    

... and then you switch to _google scholar_ ;)

~~~
rubidium
Which stops being helpful after year 4 : )

------
elliottkember
I hate this fact. Not because the internet is in peril of going down, or
because it's not convenient (of course it is) - but because we're confusing
access to information with knowledge.

Access to information will tell you a number, or an answer, or even give you
an amount of text about something. But knowledge lets you understand the
bigger picture - how something came to be, or why.

At some point we become the needle on the gramophone, rather than the record.
All we can say is what we've heard or read. It's the opposite of thinking, and
it makes me worry.

~~~
jedbrown
Trivia is not useful knowledge in today's world. The most important thing is
problem formulation. Once you have figured out the right question to ask,
answering it is usually easy.

~~~
Wingman4l7
This is why I'm so fascinated with Vernor Vinge's "wearables" future, and why
I think parts of it are such an accurate representation of the near future.
For instance, high schools have classes called "Search and Analysis" --
basically advanced Googling & result interpretation. People have recognized
that the ability to formulate the proper query is almost as important as being
able to understand the results.

Check out his short story _Fast Times At Fairmont High_ [1] and the short
_Synthetic Serendipity_ [2].

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Fast_Times_at_Fairmont_High)

[2]: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-
serend...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity)

------
manaskarekar
Mandatory xkcd : <http://xkcd.com/903/>

You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the
paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in
case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain.

I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that
might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

This is also why I love man pages.

Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this
out:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download>

I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below.
Thanks, I'll look into those.

~~~
hk_kh
I also like this <http://thewikireader.com/>

~~~
manaskarekar
That's awesome! I wonder if there are any options with a bigger screen, or if
any of the ereaders can be made to store wikipedia locally.

------
danso
> _I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not
> be audited by wikipedia on the spot._

Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The
former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of
500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit.

> _Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead
> of copying and pasting the error._

I don't even know how com sci algorithm courses pose a challenge anymore.
Google was barely a thing when I took it and when we occasionally stumbled on
obscure papers with it (or Excite), it was like finding the teacher's answer
book out in the open.

> _Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were
> up to._

This is not such a loss. I think back when you had to call people, your
conversations had to be more deliberate (i.e. I'm calling Jane to break up
with her/give condolences about her dead mother) and planned. Not planned out
in what you were going to say, necessarily, but planned out in that you
wouldn't just call up a non-close friend and have a lengthy conversation with
them. Whereas with online chat and Facebook, I've had long rewarding
conversations with people whom I may never had the temerity to cold-call about
anything.

~~~
corin_
"Talking shit" can mean exactly the same thing as "talking bullshit", in the
UK at least.

~~~
freehunter
In the US, talking shit means saying something negative about someone. John
said I stole money from him? He's just talking shit. This could include
truths; perhaps I did take his money, but there's more to the story than John
mentioned. John paid me money for a service I performed but he thought it
wasn't worth what he paid. John said I'm a cheat when I beat him in poker, but
that was just the way the cards fell. He's talking shit about me again.

Talking bullshit would mean knowingly lying. John paid me for a service I told
him I could perform, but I was bullshitting him when I said that. I can't
actually perform the service. The mayor campaigned on lower taxes, but he knew
he wouldn't be able to change that law.

~~~
corin_
Here you can "talk shit _about_ " which has the meaning you use (e.g. "I was
just talking shit about my colleagues"), whereas just "he's talking shit" is
similar to bullshit, except maybe a little less angry and more dismissive.

~~~
freehunter
Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no modifier)
is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence; the only time I
can recall hearing it is when person1 is telling person2 that person3 was
talking shit about them. In that situation, the "about you" part is implied,
and you can leave it off. "Don't worry about it man, he's just talking shit."
That implies person1 is saying person3 said something negative about person2.

Now, what I would be doing in a bar is "shooting the shit". This means you're
just telling bullshit stories (wild, made up, inaccurate, designed purely for
entertainment). I caught a 30" bluegill is bullshit, and I would only say that
when I'm in a bar shooting the shit.

~~~
corin_
> _Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no
> modifier) is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence_

No, no, no! In the UK it is not uncommon! People over here are talking shit
all the time, often not about anyone.

~~~
freehunter
Language is a wonderful, complex, irritating thing. The same words in the same
language meaning two different, completely context-sensitive things. The same
word being used in completely different ways. Not being able to describe the
use of a word without long, protracted arguments giving multiple examples of
the usage. Even in the same county, the same language is used differently
based on geographical region.

It amuses me to hear a US citizen use words and pronunciations I know are from
the UK, just due to exposure to the BBC. In the US, Hyundai is pronounced
"hun-die" or "hun-day", but I have a coworker who is very much an American who
pronounces it "high-un-die" because the only time he hears the word is when
watching Top Gear.

The Internet makes it difficult to tell which dialect the author is speaking,
spawning these arguments and fostering communication between people 3000mi
away from each other. That's a wonderful thing. Now if only I could figure out
what a curry is and why everyone seems to love it over there.

~~~
quantumstate
I'm actually pretty surprised about the curry thing. Here in the UK we get so
much US media (films and TV) that I feel like I have a fairly good grasp of
what they have in America. Not having curry has shocked me though.

~~~
corin_
Do they not have curry or just not call it curry? Admittedly I don't think I'm
ever eaten anything like that when in America, but never really thought about
it..

------
droob
When you hold a bunch of information in your head, you benefit from your
brain's penchant for making weird collisions and connections. Serendipity
rules.

------
cliveholloway
These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get
that far, the rest is easy.

eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the
question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd
google "date regular expression".

You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know
more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every
chapter.

~~~
mseebach
> If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence".
> If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

And then you've got two problems :)
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%20parsing)

------
K2h
I know taking issue with Einstien is not a good idea - but I'll do it anyway.
Learning - and putting as much relevent material in your working memory is
beneficial to seeing the bigger picture and quick informed decisions. A
collection of one line facts (what you get when you look something up) does
not make wisdom. Sure, most of us have extremely small working memories, but
it does not negate the benefit for learning and retaining material on a
subject.

as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and...
every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.

~~~
DanBC
Feynman makes a good point when he's describing why he isn't a genius.

Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't
remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but
everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is
the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something)
and everyone says "wow".

It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered
a lot of it.

I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some
interesting characteristic.

~~~
bandy
With a very possible "interesting characteristic" being the measurements of
the lady who answered the phone.

------
poblano
The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on
Conan O'Brien:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ>

------
bcl
The ability to 'Google it' does not mean you have the ability to understand
it. There is a difference between looking up Jeopardy facts and building a
fundamental understanding of the subject and being able to discuss it, or
build upon it to come up with new ideas.

------
hadronzoo
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn
to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in
writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will
discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an
elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the
appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without
instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the
most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but
only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus

------
jhull
"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead
of copying and pasting the error."

I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about
StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for
yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently
every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset
kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C
programming.

------
repoman
Is it bad? No. Is it acceptable? No. Where is the line? It's okay to spend
your whole day trying to get tutorials out of Google because the documentation
sucks or you just have no idea how the f you can start with that idea. But you
must be able to digest them effectively and extends those tutorials beyond
just tutorials, and make something out of them. Otherwise, if you just reuse
tutorial codes from top to bottom everywhere, then you are not learning. You
are copying.

------
njharman
That (externalizing our memory) has been ongoing for long time. Going back in
time; Computerized searching, Indexes, Libraries, Books, Written language,
probably something like counting stones in pre-history.

I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know
everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it
(search time/connection speed).

It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom
must be fought for.

------
elorant
filetype:pdf has been my secret weapon. I use it like fifty times a week
looking for white papers, case studies, etc for various subjects. The wealth
of information hidden in these little gems is invaluable.

------
antonioevans
I tell people all the time.. "Do you remember when you could bullshit anyone."
Now they just type your BS into their smart phone.

~~~
jgroome
It was a simpler time. You could misinform just about anybody about anything.
Yoko Ono? Sure, her influence in the Beatles would arguably ruin them forever,
but after John Lennon's death she went on to invent Skittles.

It's an art now though. You have to pick little tidbits that SOUND plausible
but you can never really verify.

I, for example, told my (American) flatmate months ago that no living person
other than current sitting monarch can appear on a British postage stamp. Had
to backtrack when the Royal Mail announced every British gold medal winner at
London 2012 would get their own stamp.

~~~
parenthesis
According to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_on_stamps_of_the_United_Kingdom)
what you said did used to be approximately correct.

------
Tycho
The only thing comparable to Google searching is Twitteer search. Case in
point: this morning after reading the sad news of director Tony Scott's death,
I inevitable felt morbidly curious about what the circumstances or motivations
might have been. Plenty of other people will too, so eventually it will find
it's way into the press, but only after days or maybe weeks. So, I opened
Twitter on my iPad and searched for 'Tony Scott rumours' and there was the
likely answer among the first few results. Of course it was only unconfirmed
conjecture but enough to satisfy my curiosity so I wouldn't spend any more
time thinking about the event.

Tweets are more instant and just more human IMO. It means you can better
leverage your understanding of human behaviour when you try to search for
things.

------
D9u
The OP should Google "@viewport" so his site can be accessible to mobile
devices.

------
uncoder0
Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for
Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the
text.

~~~
wernah
Thanks mate, i'll check it out

------
greggman
I find this similar to the math vs arithmetic issue. Math is not arithmetic.
We used to have to spend a lot of time on arithmetic to do math. Now we skip
the arithmetic since a calculator or computer can do it leaving us free to do
the fun and interesting part, math

Similarly, we used to have to wonder about simple facts. Now though simple
facts are at our finger tips leaving us to move directly to the deeper more
interesting topics.

------
CodeCube
The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's
also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look
official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on
youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look
at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a
mass fleecing of a generation.

~~~
PakG1
There are trolls on Twitter who make it their mission to make big media fall
for big-ass lies, like the death of heads of state, etc.

------
Skillset
I also like to Google everything, even individual words or proper names I
already know the meaning of, just because I can. I use the Google Dictionary
Extension for Chrome. Just double-click anything on the web and it pops up.
Pretty awesome stuff.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboac...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja)

------
wazoox
Memory is an essential, invaluable tool to support knowledge. Knowledge isn't
an accumulation of facts, and it's important to chain them into coherent
ensembles to be able to understand them, therefore training and enhancing
intelligence. I both try to remember everything of significance (NOT factoids,
or phone numbers) AND google everything. This is absolutely not contradictory.

------
kruk
A year ago there was a study conducted on that topic:
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.abstract>

It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.:
<http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory>

------
tyler_ball
I have friends that don't even type URLs anymore, they just type 'youtube'
into google every time and click the first result.

~~~
dean
Yes. I have seen this a lot with friends and co-workers. They always google
the site instead of typing in the URL or even creating a bookmark. Even for
sites they go to 20 times a day.

Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using
a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by
googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I
explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The
person just gave me a blank stare.

------
__abc
Anyone else hit 'command + w' to see what it does to then have the damn window
exit on them ..... ARGH!!!! :)

------
bwang29
Very interesting read. It makes me wonder if it is all about access time and
the complexity of the query, then to what extent could "Google everything" be
able to outsource our brain space?

------
Karunamon
Who's the overly-PC type who removed the "fucking" from the title that was
originally here?

------
prophetjohn
As a side note, your blog looks very nice, but is unusable on a Nexus 7 in
portrait mode.

------
agumonkey
I personally etymonline.com everything.. root fetishist.

------
Codhisattva
The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.

------
naavinm
Great article.

------
jsavimbi
> Shit-talking in the pub.

I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people
just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up.

What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops
talking to me. For good.

------
Claudus
I'm a free thinker.

I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit
they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that
cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form
within documented knowledge...

Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to
documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an
informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around
arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is
(if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not
water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes).

And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I
bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't
have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through
drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up
on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files.

Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are
crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling
and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and
reason for themselves.

~~~
illuminate
All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge.

There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts. Focusing on one over
the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.

~~~
Claudus
What a nonsensical comment.

> All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge.

What? First, sophistry, has little to do with anything I wrote. Second, I'm
most certainly endorsing knowledge.

> There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts.

Really? Do you have little slots for them on your spice rack? Logic and facts
are the fabric of reality. This a comment I'd expect from someone desperately
wanting to be right despite being pathologically wrong.

> Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that
> their brain falls out.

How was I focusing on one? Logic and facts are complimentary, and even if you
somehow exclusively focused on one, how would that lead to extreme open-
mindedness? And how is being open-minded bad? (You are also misusing the
"being so open-minded their brain falls out" quote which is meant to meant to
convey that you should be open-minded [good] but not foolishly accepting of
poorly formulated ideas [bad]) What do you even mean by this comment? It is
nonsense.

I think you read my comment, self identify as a hipster or "bullshitter", had
an emotional response of wanting to retort and instead wrote a post that
illustrated one of my points.

