Research shows – Google not making us stupid after all

Nov 28, 2009 by liesdamnedlies

Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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