by Frances Laing

Created on: August 19, 2009

As a writer, I struggle to criticize Google search. I'm constantly amazed by the surprises that await me when I type a selection of words into that small box in the corner of my screen. Personally, I find the whole thing intellectually stimulating and endlessly creative. It's sometimes haphazard - but I enjoy that too. It's stimulating. There's even a strange kind of poetry about it. As a child I remember how my family purchased our first edition of 'Children's Britannica'. I loved it. The set was very expensive at the time and my parents must have thought carefully about the purchase. Most families have a computer now - and Google Search is free.

But I'm aware that my enjoyment and appreciation of this search tool has most certainly been shaped by my academic training. It's more than thirty years since I began spending a lot of time in libraries, writing essays, searching through card files, gathering information, sifting through facts and putting them in some sort of order. Compared to older, low-tech methods of looking for information - Google search seems like a people's revolution! You can access so many varied opinions, facts and photographs and you don't even need to leave your own home to do so.

And there lies my biggest criticizm - I suppose it's a pretty fundamental one. Google search is too easy. I worry about how it is going to affect generations of children who are growing up with this sort of tool.

That familiar search box is discerning in it's own way - we know about Google's algorithms (although we don't know exactly how they work or how often and why they are changed). We know many things about the process of page ranking too. Writers like Jeff Jarvis have analysed how Google has shaped our attitudes and approach to life and our ways of doing business (see discussions of his book: "What would Google do?").

But the children who are growing up with Google do not necessarily have access to information about how to go about researching a subject properly - about how to test facts for accuracy. The Google search box was simply not designed to do this important job. There is a huge amount of really important information on the Internet - but there's a lot of total rubbish too. We can value our search engines but we also need to understand the process of human learning and look at how knowledge is produced and maintained in a high-tech society.

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