Using Google
These days I have done something that I have not done for the last year: I searched on Google. Yep, I didn’t do a search on Google for quite a while. The reasons that kept me away from Google was first the Google desktop which behaves more like a trojan than anything else and then its relationship with the Chinese government. Its hunger for information didn’t score many points with me neither: Google is a vacuum cleaner which absorbs every piece of information it can get its hands on. The huge (at the time) mailbox size of GMail reflects, to a certain extent, its hunger for information. Give the users a huge mailbox and load the mail program with features that make the users reluctant to delete email (such as tracking conversations) and they will keep most of their data with you… Its never expiring cookie says the same thing: "We want information and we will whatever is needed to get it".
To go back to Google search, I didn’t use Google search because I didn’t have to. The environment in which I was working before didn’t require me to search the web, most of the information I needed I could access very quickly, either thru information systems or thru people.
Well, that changed. I changed jobs and in the new environment I found myself tackling an application server problem. With little documentation and no tech-support I had to go back to Google. I spent 3 hours on Google trying to find some documentation with no results. It’s not the fact the Google didn’t help me find what I needed that prompted me to write this post. Is the fact that I grew to view web-search as a last choice for information retrieval. For the last year I have put up a library on del.icio.us where I go if I need to find something. I have subscribed to various feeds which provide me with very good information that I index according to my needs. I have come back to it when I needed to get some research about outsourcing from Western Europe, I didn’t have to go to Google and start from scratch and sift thru mountains of garbage in order to find what I need. The effort of putting up a small library, of interacting with human beings interested in the same fields as you is a good long-term investment.
I am slowly coming to the conclusion that dependence on web-search reflects a poor environment (in my case poor documentation and no tech support). What I needed should have been covered way better by my application server provider, I should not have to go Google and struggle to find a significant keyword that would have provided me with the answer. My application server provider should have found a way to channel all the information that their users have to me. They failed and the only thing I could fall back was searching on Google. (I am wondering how many tech departments out there outsource to Google the indexing their information rather than putting up a decent system that their users can rely on.)
Using a search engine may mean, to a certain extent, the assumption of instant gratification: "I don’t really want to put the effort in acquiring this information, I’ll just ask Google for it". Don’t be surprised if Google will not find it for you. It may also mean a poor environment where your source of information is a search engine that is not an authority in the field you are interested in.
