essay on searching answers on google

Google Essay for Students and Teacher

500+ words essay on google.

Google is named after the mathematical word “googol,” described as the value represented by one followed by 100 zeros. Google is the leading Internet search engine; its main service provides customers with targeted search outcomes chosen from over 8 billion web pages. Both Stanford dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed Google search technology from a college project. Thus, an insight into Google Essay discusses how Google works and came into existence.

Google is undoubtedly today’s most famous and interesting business in the globe. It’s the mission, according to its corporate website, is to “organize the data of the world and make it widely available and helpful” (Google, 2010).

Google ranked first in the annual “Best companies” of Fortune Magazine, winning other top businesses in 2007 and 2008 for two successive years. His performance as a top employer is due to his inner corporate culture the most quoted reason. Google is the ultimate global company and is defined as a “fast-paced, high-energy working setting” (Google, 2010).

Because Google is focused on its “young” internet-savvy market, its employees ‘ average age is significantly smaller than most businesses. Google’s median age is 30 and the distribution of sex is 65% male and 35% female (Linkedin, 2010).

The dress code is “casual” and laid-back because it values skill and hard work, not appearance. Google has a very engaging culture of the business. Also, Google Mountain View’s headquarters, CA called Googleplex, is intended to have a “campus-like” feel in tune with its predominantly young new recruits at the college level (Google, 2010).

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Google and Rivals

Microsoft and Yahoo both invest strongly in search technology and gain market share on an ongoing basis. 2. With few rivals like Yahoo and MSN, Google operates in an oligopoly sector.

Thus, Google may find it hard to maintain its customers with low differentiation within the consequence of the search engine. Also, Yahoo and MSN launch their own search engines and targeted marketing systems; Google is in a race to create fresh search instruments to attract customers and grow their marketing networks.

Click fraud mentioned by Google as one of the potential “concerns” that may influence its income. In reality, due to click fraud, Google confessed to frequently paying refunds.

In reality, due to click fraud, Google confessed to frequently paying refunds. Click fraud happens when an individual, automated script or computer program imitates a lawful user of a web browser clicking on an advertisement in order to generate an inappropriate charge per click in the online pay-per-click advertisement.

For instance, Network click fraud-you are hosting ads on your own private website from Google AdSense. Google charges you each time you click on your website’s ad. Its fraud if you sit on the desktop constantly clicking on the ad or writing a computer program that clicks on the ad constantly. Such fraud is simple for Google to spot, so smart network click fraudsters simulate distinct IP addresses, or install Trojan horses on pcs from other people to produce fake clicks.

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Searching Answers on Google: the Digital Transformation of Memory and Society

How it works

• 1 The Influence of Technology and Google on Memory
• 2 Searching Answers on Google: Memory’s New Ally
• 3 Digital Dementia and Dependence on Technology
• 4 Google’s Impact on Society and Interpersonal Relationships
• 5 References:

The Influence of Technology and Google on Memory

Do you remember what a struggle it was to remember information? Now, with a Google search, the answers are right at your fingertips. Although technology has improved our lives in many ways, it has changed the way our brain works and processes information. Technology, like Google Web, has also changed the way we live our daily lives and the way we learn. The average number of Google searches per day has grown from 9,800 in 1998 to over 4.

7 trillion today. Our brain uses information stored in long-term memory to further our critical thinking. In order to understand and interact with the world around us, we need these unique memories.

Searching Answers on Google: Memory’s New Ally

Although technology may not affect the information we receive, it does affect how we store it in our memory. Even though our brains can hold almost an infinite amount of information, technology can still have an effect on how much information we are able to store. According to Benjamin Storm, who leads a study says,“ Memory is changing. Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory, we become more reliant on it.” He continues to say that we would have to try to recall information on our own; now, we don’t even bother. As more information becomes available via Google, it becomes more reliant on our daily lives, he says. Our brains are slowly adapting to the technology. There is no need to memorize a map when GPS is in place to lead the way, and people can begin to lose their sense of direction. There is also little need to memorize phone numbers, because smartphones automatically program contacts. It’s helpful to have Google available for data about anything and GPS that guarantees we never make a wrong turn. We are likewise ending up more defenseless to what specialists are calling advanced dementia. People can travel all around the world without a psychical map; with the capability of Google Maps, you can easily track where you are or where your destination is with a push of a button. Because of technology, we don’t rely on our memory as much. As technology does more for us, we rely on our memories less.

Digital Dementia and Dependence on Technology

Dementia is a loss of mental ability severe enough to interfere with normal activities of daily living. According to the blog “ Overuse of Technology Can Lead to digital dementia,” individuals who rely on technology may suffer deterioration in cerebral performance, such as short-term memory dysfunction. This blog continuously says how people have become highly dependent on technology to the point where it is ruining our brains. A study conducted at UCLA has shown some important information about the developing brains of young people. They’re spending 7 hours a day attached to technology. The effects on their brains are proving to be very damaging. “Over-use of smartphones and game devices hampers the balanced development of the brain,” Byun Gi-won, a doctor at the Balance Brain Center in Seoul, told the JoongAng Daily newspaper. The U.S. study blamed modern lifestyles for the problem, saying that spending time on a computer and texting prevents people from focusing and memorizing information.

According to Betsy Sparrow, search engines like Google change the way we memorize and remember things. Sparrow and her team tested how people remember information when such information is stored somewhere accessible, like, say, the Internet. Experts call this transactive memory, being able to remember where you can get the information and not the information itself. The results of the study were the way our brain saves data has changed because of the “confidence” we have to find them online. “We’re not thoughtless empty-headed people who don’t have memories anymore,” Sparrow said. “But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go find things, And that’s kind of amazing.” The study began by gathering 60 students who were asked to type 40 pieces of trivia; some examples were “An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.”

Some students were told the information would be saved, and others were told it would be erased. To further the experiment, the participants were asked not only to remember the trivia statement itself but which of the five computer folders it was saved in. The research that was found from this showed students are “primed” to look to the Internet first for knowledge. Another experiment that was tested on 34 undergraduates in New York City showed that the students were able to remember where they stored that information better than they could remember the information themselves. “ it isn’t clear what the effects of being so wired will have on people over time.” Betsy Sparrow was very mind blown, “our brains rely on the internet for our memory in the same exact way our memory relies on a friend or a family member.”

Google’s Impact on Society and Interpersonal Relationships

Technology not only transforms societies, but it also changes social interactions and relationships between people. Technology, like Google, has had a huge effect on our society. Google has been a very great research tool, but it has made people very lazy and dependent on technology. The use of this technology affects our health. It first affects the way of thinking. In today’s world, people are not only found dependent on technology, they can also be dependent on it. The utilization of social media has shortened our attention span from 12 minutes in order to 5 minutes. People who’re online for about 5 hours each day have trouble remembering people’s names and, in many cases, their own birthdays. “Our world has begun to revolve around technological goods, and we are becoming so much tech-freak that our social communication has been seriously disturbed.” I believe the advancement of technology has negatively impacted our social interactions because it detaches us from what is happening around us. Society must be able to use technology while not allowing it to disrupt our social interactions. Data shows that those who use the Internet frequently spend over 100 minutes less time with friends and family than non-Internet users, according to Norman H. Nie and D. Sunshine Hillygus in their paper “The Impact of Internet Use on Sociability.” When our communication skills decrease, we begin “spending less time talking to families, experiencing more daily stress, and feeling more lonely and depressed,” writes Affonso.

A blog made by Tom Risen called “Is the Internet Bad for Society and Relationships?” They published a survey of about 1,000 adults about their views of how the Internet has had an impact on their lives. They were asked whether they thought the Internet was good or bad for society; 15% answered it was bad for society, 76% said it was good, and 8% were neutral. When the participants were asked if the Internet strengthened their relationships with family, 67% of Internet users said yes, 18 % said it weakens those relationships, 4% said both, and another 4% said neither.“I, too, see our relying on some kinds of outsourcing technology as both likely and helpful. But I also believe extreme dependency is a problem to be aware of” wrote Selinger. The constant switch from one task to another tires your brain out. The brain gets tired of the information, especially if the information is received chaotically. The brain takes time to “digest” the received data and to process this information. But instead of this, many people continue to stuff it with new information from social networks or the Internet, keeping away from resting.

References:

Gwinn, E. (2013). Overuse of Technology Can Lead to Digital Dementia. JoongAng Daily Newspaper.

Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776-778. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207745

Chatterjee, A., Bhanot, S., Frank, L. B., Murphy, S. T., & Power, G. (2009). Online Social Networks and Health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 38(4), 438-441. DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2008.12.006

Nie, N. H., & Hillygus, D. S. (2002). The Impact of Internet Use on Sociability: Time-Diary Findings. IT & Society, 1(1), 1-20.

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How Has Google Affected The Way Students Learn?

Please try again

Take a look at this question: How do modern novels represent the characteristics of humanity?

If you were tasked with answering it, what would your first step be? Would you scribble down your thoughts — or would you Google it?

Terry Heick, a former English teacher in Kentucky, had a surprising revelation when his eighth- and ninth-grade students quickly turned to Google.

"What they would do is they would start Googling the question, 'How does a novel represent humanity?' " Heick says. "That was a real eye-opener to me."

For those of us who grew up with search engines, especially Google, at our fingertips — looking at all of you millennials and post-millennials — this might seem intuitive. We grew up having our questions instantly answered as long as we had access to the Internet.

Now, with the advent of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now that aim to serve up information before you even know you need it , you don't even need to type the questions. Just say the words and you'll have your answer.

But with so much information easily available, does it make us smarter? Compared to the generations before who had to adapt to the Internet, how are those who grew up using the Internet — the so-called "Google generation" — different?

Heick had intended for his students to take a moment to think, figure out what type of information they needed, how to evaluate the data and how to reconcile conflicting viewpoints. He did not intend for them to immediately Google the question, word by word — eliminating the process of critical thinking.

More Space To Think Or Less Time To Think?

There is a relative lack of research available examining the effect of search engines on our brains even as the technology is rapidly dominating our lives. Of the studies available, the answers are sometimes unclear.

Some argue that with easy access to information, we have more space in our brain to engage in creative activities, as humans have in the past.

Whenever new technology emerges — including newspapers and television — discussions about how it will threaten our brainpower always crops up, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The New York Times. Instead of making us stupid, he wrote, the Internet and technology "are the only things that will keep us smart."

Daphne Bavelier , a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

Writer Nicholas Carr contends that the Internet will take away our ability for contemplation due to the plasticity of our brains. He wrote about the subject in a 2008 article for The Atlantic titled " Is Google Making Us Stupid ."

"... what the [Internet] seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," Carr wrote.

The few studies available, however, do not seem to bode well for the Google generation.

A 2008 study commissioned by the British Library found that young people go through information online very quickly without evaluating it for accuracy.

A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself.

That phenomenon is similar to not remembering your friend's birthday because you know you can find it on Facebook. When we know that we can access this information whenever we want, we are not motivated to remember it.

'I'm Always On My Computer'

Michele Nelson, an art teacher at Estes Hills Elementary School in Chapel Hill, N.C., seems to share Carr's concerns. Nelson, who has been teaching for more than nine years, says it was obvious with her middle school students and even her 15-year-old daughter that they are unable to read long texts anymore.

"They just had a really hard time comprehending if they went to a website that had a lot of information," Nelson says. "They couldn't grasp it, they couldn't figure out what the important thing was."

Nelson says she struggles with the same problem.

"I'm always on my computer. ... I don't read books as much as I used to," she says. "It's a lot harder for my brain to get to a place where I can follow and enjoy the reading, and I get distracted very easily."

The bright side lies in a 2009 study conducted by Gary Small, the director of University of California Los Angeles' Longevity Center , that explored brain activity when older adults used search engines. He found that among older people who have experience using the Internet, their brains are two times more active than those who don't when conducting Internet searches.

Internet searching, Small says, is like a brain exercise that can be good for our mental health.

"If somebody has normal memory when they're older, I always encourage them to use the computer," he says. "It enhances our lives."

For Small, the problem for younger people is the overuse of the technology that leads to distraction. Otherwise, he is excited for the new innovations in technology.

"We tend to be economical in terms of how we use our brain, so if you know you don't have to memorize the directions to a certain place because you have a GPS in your car, you're not going to bother with that," Small says. "You're going to use your mind to remember other kinds of information."

How To Teach Digital Natives?

Heick has since left teaching to start TeachThought , a company that produces content to support teachers in "innovation in teaching and learning for a 21st century audience."

To him, the Internet holds great potential for education — but curriculum must change accordingly. Since content is so readily available, teachers should not merely dole out information and instead focus on cultivating critical thinking, he says.

"Classroom walls and school building walls are transparent, with technology essentially bringing the outside world to the classroom and vice versa," he says.

Heick says his company recently started working with schools and organizations in a few states, including North Carolina, Texas and New York, to develop lesson plans.

"Google really lubricates that access to information and while that is fantastic, it makes us have to change a bit the way we think about things," Heick says. "Because we're so busy, we have this false security that we understand something because we Googled it. Now we're moving on to the next thing instead of really rolling around with this idea and trying to understand it."

One of his recommendations is to make questions "Google-proof."

"Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one," he writes in his company's blog . "If students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there's a problem with the instructional design."

Meanwhile, teenagers are also aware of how the Internet is taking ahold of their lives. Caitlyn Nelson, teacher Michele Nelson's daughter, finds it hard to focus when she is forced to do readings or even exams online. Like most teenagers, sometimes she finds herself surfing the Web when she's supposed to be reading PowerPoint slides in class.

Caitlyn talks about a video they watched in English class about the impact of technology.

"We talked about how technology is changing ... how most people are basically becoming zombies and slaves to the Internet because that's all we can do," she says.

"I feel really bad that I'm connected to my phone all the time instead of talking to my mom. But she's also addicted to her phone."

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Elan Ullendorff

Google’s Search Box Changed the Meaning of Information

The hallway is bathed in harsh white, a figment of LEDs. Along the walls, doors recede endlessly into the distance. Each flaunts a crown of blue light at its base, except for the doors you’ve walked through before, which instead emit a deep purple. But these are but specks of sand in the desert of gateways.

You are searching for something.

You prepare yourself for an arduous journey. Before the first door you come upon a pedestal. The box that lies on the pedestal gives airs of gildedness despite being as plain as the walls that surround it. It isn’t adorned with a title, but its name echoes in your mind, intuitively: the Answer Box. A plaque reads:

I have crawled through each and every door. Not just the doors in this hallway, but the doors in every hallway in existence, the doors within doors, as well as some doors that I dare not show you, doors that would make you flee in terror. I have seen everything. I am impartial. I have your best interests at heart. I understand what it is you want to know and it is knowable. I have the answer that you seek.

Your finger caresses the latch.

Cataloging the web was doomed from the start. In the summer of 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer (WWWW), arguably the first internet bot and web crawler. During its first official attempt to index the web, the Wanderer returned from its expedition with 130 URLs. But even in the baby years of the internet, this list was incomplete.

To understand how a simple web crawler works, imagine making a travel itinerary that contains three cities: New York, Tokyo, Paris. While visiting each destination, listen for any mentions of other places and add those to your itinerary. Your world crawl is complete when you have visited all of the cities on your ever growing list. Will you have seen a lot of places by the end of your journey? Undoubtedly. But will you have seen the whole world? Almost certainly not. There will always be cities, or entire webs of cities, that are effectively invisible to this process.

A web crawler similarly consults a list of URLs and recursively visits any links it sees. But the resulting index should not be confused with a comprehensive directory of the internet, which does not exist.

I have a theory of technology that places every informational product on a spectrum from Physician to Librarian:

The Physician's primary aim is to protect you from context. In diagnosing or treating you, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, but rather than presenting that information to you in its raw form, they condense and synthesize. This is for good reason: When you go to a doctor’s office, your primary aim is not to have your curiosity sparked or to dive into primary sources; you want answers, in the form of diagnosis or treatment. The Physician saves you time and shelters you from information that might be misconstrued or unnecessarily anxiety-provoking.

In contrast, the Librarian's primary aim is to point you toward context. In answering your questions, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, and they use that to pull you into a conversation with a knowledge system, and with the humans behind that knowledge system. The Librarian may save you time in the short term by getting you to a destination more quickly. But in the long term, their hope is that the destination will reveal itself to be a portal. They find thought enriching, rather than laborious, and understand their expertise to be in wayfinding rather than solutions. Sometimes you ask a Librarian a question and they point you to a book that is an answer to a question you didn't even think to ask. Sometimes you walk over to the stacks to retrieve the book, only for a different book to catch your eye instead. This too is success to the Librarian.

Adrienne So

There are book reviews that say "I read this so you don't have to" (Physician), and others that say "I read this and you should too" (Librarian). There are apps that put you in a perpetual state of simmering, unrealized wanderlust from the comfort of your couch (Physician) and others that inspire you to get up and go (Librarian).

A search engine, at its core, is a product that tries to help you visit pages made by humans, quintessentially Librarian. In a 2004 Playboy interview , Google cofounder Larry page was unequivocal in his assertion that he wanted to “get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.” But over the past 10 years, let's just say Google has gone to medical school. The answer is king; a mere link is nothing more than failure of technology.

Google Search launched five years after the World Wide Web Wanderer, and its main innovation was its PageRank algorithm, which created a trustworthiness score for each website based on how often other "trustworthy" sites linked to it; this score was used not only to decide which sites to index and how often, but also how highly to rank them in search results.

I'd like to emphasize here the utter audaciousness of this undertaking. I remember when Google first announced in 2007 that it would take 3D scans of the world in order to power Google Street View. The task felt impossibly, absurdly immense. But over the course of a decade, whether through sheer economic might, or creative use (or exploitation) of labor, Google managed to do just that . Or at least, it's convinced us that it has.

Every large-scale archival project is a Shakespearian tragedy that always ends the same way: incomplete. It requires players with the hubris to go on every night, as well as an audience willing to suspend disbelief, to believe in a corporate overlord's omniscience and omnipresence. Because there are more streets than it is realistic to scan. And even once scanned, a street continues to evolve: Buildings are torn down, trees grow taller, empires fall. The signified distances itself from the signifier. So difficult decisions need to be made. And hidden within those decisions are ideologies about which places are worth saving.

The number of websites outnumbers miles of road by many orders of magnitude.

Building an index, while onerous, is only part of the battle. There is also the problem of processing your search query into a list of results. Usually this involves natural language processing (NLP), a set of techniques that help computers interpret human communication. A rudimentary NLP algorithm might split the query "baking a loaf of bread" into individual tokens (baking, a, loaf, of, bread), remove any commonly occurring words that don't add much obvious meaning to the query (baking, loaf, bread), reduce words to their base form to better match word variations (bake, loaf, bread), and expand the query to include common synonyms (bake, cook, prepare, make, craft, loaf, bread).

But the more sophisticated NLP techniques that Google uses today involves wielding a concoction of interconnected machine learning algorithms that predict which results will be most useful to a searcher. The underlying goal is to understand a user's "intent" using any contextual clues at its disposal: current events, and the user's location, search history, language, device. When a user searches for the word "mars," are they searching for information about the planet, the God, the gene, the chocolate bar, the present-tense verb, or the city in Nebraska?

Of course, natural language is a bit of a misnomer. There is nothing "natural" (in the colloquial sense) about the way we talk to Google. We wouldn't walk over to a friend and bark "italian restaurant nearby" or "what watch netflix romcom." In the words of the media scholar Father John Culkin, "we shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.” Put differently, we evolve to ask our questions in ways that we think our machines can answer them, and over time, privilege questions that are technologically solvable. Can Google ever really understand what our intent is? Can we ?

A piece of software that interprets your intent and returns a list of links from a large index is a perfectly usable search engine. However, since the early 2010s, Google has embraced a radically different vision of what a search engine can be: one that can respond directly to questions directly on the results page. This feature has been referred to using a slew of confusing, ever-changing names (rich answers, direct answers, instant answers, quick answers, featured snippets, knowledge panel), but for our purposes we’ll use the colloquial umbrella category: the Answer Box.

The Knowledge Graph , a semantic network that perceives the world in terms of discrete entities containing structured data, plays a pivotal role in Google's pursuit of this vision. Under the Knowledge Graph, for example, the band Boygenius is associated with genres, record labels, a discography, images, a list of links and videos, and contains the members Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, who are each themselves considered entities in the Graph with their own associated data.

To cast a slightly wider net of answerable questions, Google also uses a technique it calls Passage Ranking , which picks out specific excerpts from pages that might answer a user's question, whether or not it's the focus of the page. Passage Ranking can tell me, among other things, how Boygenius met ("Julien and Lucy performed on the same bill in Washington, DC, followed by Julien meeting Phoebe a month later"), where the band's name came from (“men are taught to be entitled to space … a 'boygenius' is someone who their whole life has been told that their ideas are genius”), and pluck out of a 1400-word New Yorker profile that Julien Baker is “five feet tall and a hundred and five pounds.”

The vision of the world that these rich results represent is one in which everything worth knowing is unambiguous and perfectly atomizable; call it the baseball-card-ification of knowledge. For anything else, well, for that you'll have to scroll a bit. A 2020 investigation by The Markup found that almost half of Google's mobile results page on the most popular queries was taken up by links to Google's own properties via sections like the “knowledge panel,” “people also ask,” and “featured snippets.”

All of these technologies—web crawling, PageRank, Natural Language Processing, the Knowledge Graph, and Passage Ranking—converge to convince us of a sequence of lies: I have seen everything. I am impartial. I have your best interests at heart. I understand what it is you want to know and it is knowable. I have the answer that you seek.

The Answer Box's decade of glory, at least in its current form, may be coming to an end. Google has announced , to much fanfare, that it is experimenting with injecting generative AI into the results page. This will enable Google to present answers to more oblique queries, like "tell me what makes boygenius' music unique or special," or "write a poem using the titles of unreleased boygenius tracks," queries that we now might associate more with ChatGPT.

Ask ChatGPT a question, and you will be given a convincing-sounding answer, what Neil Gaiman calls " information-shaped sentences ." When I asked it to give me examples of how different cultural and historical contexts shape the definition of creativity, it readily rattled off 10 vague but coherent examples of differing expressions of creativity across time and space. But when I asked it to point me to the source of its knowledge about creativity and Indigenous Australian "Dreamtime" stories, it could only say "as an AI language model, I have been trained on a large dataset of written text, including books, articles, and other documents from a diverse range of fields and sources … I don't have direct access to specific sources that I have been trained on." It then began to list some books I might read, many of which were invented whole cloth. Generative AI is far from the beginning of Google’s foray into Physician-based search, but it just may be the straw that breaks the Librarian’s back.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a Physician. Diving into rabbit holes is time-consuming, and sometimes, with a trusted source, it is worth discarding context to get to the root of understanding. The problem is when that Physician is not a person or a population of people but a monolithic cluster of machine learning algorithms. When we talk about AI, the speed at which we run toward or away from context becomes amplified, and we run along with the three horsemen of generative text—misinformation, economic exploitation, and creative rot—all of which are enlivened by context collapse and allergic to depth.

But even scarier is the soft apocalypse of a truth that's reduced to trivia.

There is the kind of commodifiable Physician-truth you’d get from an encyclopedia entry: Visit five different webpages and they will tell you the same melting point of gold. But there are other kinds of truth as well, the kinds inherent in the poetry—not poems, mind you, but poetry —of everyday context. There is truth in the aesthetic sensibilities of a webpage, in a text’s surroundings, and in a writer's voice. It's the truth of a speaker's involuntary gestures, the twitch of a lip. Truth in the way words feel tossed about the top of your tongue, in the slanting of letterforms , in slips o fthe pen, in (the volume of the words in) parentheses. A sentence fragment that interrupts a rhythm.

A text changes with the knowledge of its provenance. A text changes with the knowledge of how much work was put into it. A reader finds meaning in atmosphere and timbre in the same way that a parent knows whether a baby is crying out of hunger, fear, or exhaustion, or a heart is moved differently by the same song performed in a new key. Like the keen understanding that persists after you awaken from a dream you can't remember, communing with the messy context of human creativity yields a specter that lingers, haunting you with ambiguity and depth.

The specter is what Tim O'Brien called a story-truth that's "truer sometimes than happening-truth"; Audre Lorde called poetry "the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought"; and Maggie Nelson (paraphrasing Wittgenstein) called the inexpressible "contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed."

And this inexpressible, poetic story-truth transcends mere knowledge. It is the foundation of conversation, the exchange of ideas, critical thinking, serendipity, and properly valued labor. These are the particles that coalesce into a community of care that gives a shit about its inhabitants, into an internet that doesn't sacrifice the complex beauty of communication for the fleeting satisfaction of knowing.

There are hints that Google may be more interested in providing context than ChatGPT. And AI can certainly, at least in a technical sense, serve as a force in the direction of depth. But Google's business incentives and search history make me skeptical. Dividing an analog world into discrete digital bites of information means that we spend more time with Google's products. It also makes the information easily recyclable for other platforms, like Google’s voice assistants.

In another world, a web crawler can be training wheels for our own crawling, a language processing algorithm can eschew exaction in exchange for the rich stream of consciousness quality of, well, "natural" conversation, and a search engine can withhold the brick wall of a solution and instead present us with doors.

But instead, I worry that the Answer Box is a premonition of where Google wants to go, a future in which we’re hurried toward destinations, journey be damned, and links are only included out of obligation, rather than invitation. I worry that instead of evoking wonder, our tools will treat our wonder as if it’s an ailment. I worry that this will mean not only a Barthesian death of the author, but a death of the humanmade work itself, human language replaced with its simulacrum. I worry that we’re hurtling toward contextual eradication.

Which technological future do we want? One that claims to know all of the answers, or one that encourages us to ask more questions? One that prioritizes output, or accessibility? One that sees people as a dataset to mine and an inefficiency to overcome, or one that sees them as valuable and worthy of attention?

In being given exactly what we’re searching for, will we lose ourselves?

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18 Google Scholar tips all students should know

Dec 13, 2022

Think of this guide as your personal research assistant.

“It’s hard to pick your favorite kid,” Anurag Acharya says when I ask him to talk about a favorite Google Scholar feature he’s worked on. “I work on product, engineering, operations, partnerships,” he says. He’s been doing it for 18 years, which as of this month, happens to be how long Google Scholar has been around.

Google Scholar is also one of Google’s longest-running services. The comprehensive database of research papers, legal cases and other scholarly publications was the fourth Search service Google launched, Anurag says. In honor of this very important tool’s 18th anniversary, I asked Anurag to share 18 things you can do in Google Scholar that you might have missed.

1. Copy article citations in the style of your choice.

With a simple click of the cite button (which sits below an article entry), Google Scholar will give you a ready-to-use citation for the article in five styles, including APA, MLA and Chicago. You can select and copy the one you prefer.

2. Dig deeper with related searches.

Google Scholar’s related searches can help you pinpoint your research; you’ll see them show up on a page in between article results. Anurag describes it like this: You start with a big topic — like “cancer” — and follow up with a related search like “lung cancer” or “colon cancer” to explore specific kinds of cancer.

Related searches can help you find what you’re looking for.

3. And don’t miss the related articles.

This is another great way to find more papers similar to one you found helpful — you can find this link right below an entry.

4. Read the papers you find.

Scholarly articles have long been available only by subscription. To keep you from having to log in every time you see a paper you’re interested in, Scholar works with libraries and publishers worldwide to integrate their subscriptions directly into its search results. Look for a link marked [PDF] or [HTML]. This also includes preprints and other free-to-read versions of papers.

5. Access Google Scholar tools from anywhere on the web with the Scholar Button browser extension.

The Scholar Button browser extension is sort of like a mini version of Scholar that can move around the web with you. If you’re searching for something, hitting the extension icon will show you studies about that topic, and if you’re reading a study, you can hit that same button to find a version you read, create a citation or to save it to your Scholar library.

Install the Scholar Button Chrome browser extension to access Google Scholar from anywhere on the web.

6. Learn more about authors through Scholar profiles.

There are many times when you’ll want to know more about the researchers behind the ideas you’re looking into. You can do this by clicking on an author’s name when it’s hyperlinked in a search result. You’ll find all of their work as well as co-authors, articles they’re cited in and so on. You can also follow authors from their Scholar profile to get email updates about their work, or about when and where their work is cited.

7. Easily find topic experts.

One last thing about author profiles: If there are topics listed below an author’s name on their profile, you can click on these areas of expertise and you’ll see a page of more authors who are researching and publishing on these topics, too.

8. Search for court opinions with the “Case law” button.

Scholar is the largest free database of U.S. court opinions. When you search for something using Google Scholar, you can select the “Case law” button below the search box to see legal cases your keywords are referenced in. You can read the opinions and a summary of what they established.

9. See how those court opinions have been cited.

If you want to better understand the impact of a particular piece of case law, you can select “How Cited,” which is below an entry, to see how and where the document has been cited. For example, here is the How Cited page for Marbury v. Madison , a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that courts can strike down unconstitutional laws or statutes.

10. Understand how a legal opinion depends on another.

When you’re looking at how case laws are cited within Google Scholar, click on “Cited by” and check out the horizontal bars next to the different results. They indicate how relevant the cited opinion is in the court decision it’s cited within. You will see zero, one, two or three bars before each result. Those bars indicate the extent to which the new opinion depends on and refers to the cited case.

In the Cited by page for New York Times Company v. Sullivan, court cases with three bars next to their name heavily reference the original case. One bar indicates less reliance.

11. Sign up for Google Scholar alerts.

Want to stay up to date on a specific topic? Create an alert for a Google Scholar search for your topics and you’ll get email updates similar to Google Search alerts. Another way to keep up with research in your area is to follow new articles by leading researchers. Go to their profiles and click “Follow.” If you’re a junior grad student, you may consider following articles related to your advisor’s research topics, for instance.

12. Save interesting articles to your library.

It’s easy to go down fascinating rabbit hole after rabbit hole in Google Scholar. Don’t lose track of your research and use the save option that pops up under search results so articles will be in your library for later reading.

13. Keep your library organized with labels.

Labels aren’t only for Gmail! You can create labels within your Google Scholar library so you can keep your research organized. Click on “My library,” and then the “Manage labels…” option to create a new label.

14. If you’re a researcher, share your research with all your colleagues.

Many research funding agencies around the world now mandate that funded articles should become publicly free to read within a year of publication — or sooner. Scholar profiles list such articles to help researchers keep track of them and open up access to ones that are still locked down. That means you can immediately see what is currently available from researchers you’re interested in and how many of their papers will soon be publicly free to read.

15. Look through Scholar’s annual top publications and papers.

Every year, Google Scholar releases the top publications based on the most-cited papers. That list (available in 11 languages) will also take you to each publication’s top papers — this takes into account the “h index,” which measures how much impact an article has had. It’s an excellent place to start a research journey as well as get an idea about the ideas and discoveries researchers are currently focused on.

16. Get even more specific with Advanced Search.

Click on the hamburger icon on the upper left-hand corner and select Advanced Search to fine-tune your queries. For example, articles with exact words or a particular phrase in the title or articles from a particular journal and so on.

17. Find extra help on Google Scholar’s help page.

It might sound obvious, but there’s a wealth of useful information to be found here — like how often the database is updated, tips on formatting searches and how you can use your library subscriptions when you’re off-campus (looking at you, college students!). Oh, and you’ll even learn the origin of that quote on Google Scholar’s home page.

18. Keep up with Google Scholar news.

Don’t forget to check out the Google Scholar blog for updates on new features and tips for using this tool even better.

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Google — Benefits And Drawbacks Of Google Search

Benefits and Drawbacks of Google Search

• Categories: Google

About this sample

Words: 997 |

Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 997 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

• Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 6-22. (2019). Army leadership and the profession. Headquarters, Department of the Army.
• Ferrell, R. S. (2016). What does it take to be a good Army leader? Army Magazine, 66(6), 44-46.
• Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2019). Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development. Cengage Learning.
• Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications.
• O'Reilly, C. A., & Chatman, J. A. (2011). Leadership and culture: An integrated approach. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), 713-731.
• Powell, G. N. (2018). Women and leadership. Oxford University Press.
• Stogdill, R. M. (1974). Handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research. Free Press.
• Van Velsor, E., McCauley, C. D., & Ruderman, M. N. (2010). The center for creative leadership handbook of leadership development. John Wiley & Sons.
• Yukl, G. (2013). Leadership in organizations. Pearson.
• Zaccaro, S. J. (2007). Trait-based perspectives of leadership. American psychologist, 62(1), 6-16.

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The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

• Artificial Intelligence

Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google

The ai search tools are getting better — but they don’t yet understand what a search engine really is and how we really use them..

By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Share this story

AI is coming for the search business. Or so we’re told. As Google seems to keep getting worse, and tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot seem to keep getting better, we appear to be barreling toward a new way to find and consume information online. Companies like Perplexity and You.com are pitching themselves as next-gen search products, and even Google and Bing are making huge bets that AI is the future of search . Bye bye, 10 blue links; hello direct answers to all my weird questions about the world.

But the thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things. For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there’s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type “google” into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day.

The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It’s how well they can do everything Google does. So I decided to put some of the best new AI products to the real test: I grabbed the latest list of most-Googled queries and questions according to the SEO research firm Ahrefs and plugged them into various AI tools. In some instances, I found that these language model-based bots are genuinely more useful than a page of Google results. But in most cases, I discovered exactly how hard it will be for anything — AI or otherwise — to replace Google at the center of the web.

People who work in search always say there are basically three types of queries. First and most popular is navigation, which is just people typing the name of a website to get to that website. Virtually all of the top queries on Google, from “youtube” to “wordle” to “yahoo mail,” are navigation queries. In actual reality, this is a search engine’s primary job: to get you to a website.

In actual reality, a search engine’s primary job is to get you to a website

For navigational queries, AI search engines are universally worse than Google. When you do a navigational Google search, it’s exceedingly rare that the first result isn’t the one you’re looking for — sure, it’s odd to show you all those results when what Google should actually do is just take you directly to amazon.com or whatever, but it’s fast and it’s rarely wrong. The AI bots, on the other hand, like to think for a few seconds and then provide a bunch of quasi-useful information about the company when all I want is a link. Some didn’t even link to amazon.com.

I don’t hate the additional information so much as I hate how long these AI tools take to get me what I need. Waiting 10 seconds for three paragraphs of generated text about Home Depot is not the answer; I just want a link to Home Depot. Google wins that race every time.

The next most popular kind of search is the information query: you want to know something specific, about which there is a single right answer. “NFL scores” is a hugely popular information query; “what time is it” is another one; so is “weather.” It doesn’t matter who tells you the score or the time or the temperature, it’s just a thing you need to know.

Here, the results are all over the map. For real-time stuff like sports scores, the AI is not to be trusted: You.com and Perplexity both frequently gave me outdated information, though Copilot usually got it right. Google not only gets it right but usually pops up a widget with other stats and information, which is better than the others. Ditto anything requiring your specific location or context — Google probably has that information about you, but the AI bots mostly don’t.

When it comes to more evergreen information like “how many weeks in a year” or “when is mother’s day,” everything I tested got it right. In many cases I actually preferred the AI answers, which add a bit of helpful context. But I’m not sure how often I can trust them. Google told me there are 52.1429 weeks in a year, but You.com explained that actually it’s 52 weeks and a day, plus an added day on leap years. That’s more useful than just 52.1429! But then Perplexity told me that actually, a common year is 52 weeks, and a leap year is 52 weeks and a day — before directly contradicting itself two sentences later. Here’s the whole answer; just try to make sense of it:

A common year has approximately 52 weeks, while a leap year has 52 weeks and 1 day. In more precise terms, a regular year actually consists of 52.143 weeks, which means there is one additional day in a normal year. On the other hand, a leap year, occurring every four years except for certain exceptions, has 52 weeks and 2 days. This difference in the number of weeks is due to the extra day in a common year and the additional day in February during a leap year.

After doing some more research, I am now confident that the answer is what You.com said. But this all took too long, and forcing me to fact-check my searches kind of defeats the purpose of helpfully summarizing things for me. Google continues to win here on one thing and one thing alone: speed. 

There is one sub-genre of information queries in which the exact opposite is true, though. I call them Buried Information Queries. The best example I can offer is the very popular query, “how to screenshot on mac.” There are a million pages on the internet that contain the answer — it’s just Cmd-Shift-3 to take the whole screen or Cmd-Shift-4 to capture a selection, there, you’re welcome — but that information is usually buried under a lot of ads and SEO crap. All the AI tools I tried, including Google’s own Search Generative Experience, just snatch that information out and give it to you directly. This is great! 

Are there complicated questions inherent in that, which threaten the business model and structure of the web? Yep ! But as a pure searching experience, it’s vastly better. I’ve had similar results asking about ingredient substitutions, coffee ratios, headphone waterproofing ratings, and any other information that is easy to know and yet often too hard to find. 

This brings me to the third kind of Google search: the exploration query. These are questions that don’t have a single answer, that are instead the beginning of a learning process. On the most popular list, things like “how to tie a tie,” “why were chainsaws invented,” and “what is tiktok” count as explorational queries. If you ever Googled the name of a musician you just heard about, or have looked up things like “stuff to do in Helena Montana” or “NASA history,” you’re exploring. These are not, according to the rankings, the primary things people use Google for. But these are the moments AI search engines can shine.

Like, wait: why were chainsaws invented? Copilot gave me a multipart answer about their medical origins, before describing their technological evolution and eventual adoption by lumberjacks. It also gave me eight pretty useful links to read more. Perplexity gave me a much shorter answer, but also included a few cool images of old chainsaws and a link to a YouTube explainer on the subject. Google’s results included a lot of the same links, but did none of the synthesizing for me. Even its generative search only gave me the very basics.

My favorite thing about the AI engines is the citations. Perplexity, You.com, and others are slowly getting better at linking to their sources, often inline, which means that if I come across a particular fact that piques my interest, I can go straight to the source from there. They don’t always offer enough sources, or put them in the right places, but this is a good and helpful trend.

One experience I had while doing these tests was actually the most eye-opening of all. The single most-searched question on Google is a simple one: “what to watch.” Google has a whole specific page design for this, with rows of posters featuring “Top picks” like Dune: Part Two and Imaginary ; “For you” which for me included Deadpool and Halt and Catch Fire ; and then popular titles and genre-sorted options. None of the AI search engines did as well: Copilot listed five popular movies; Perplexity offered a random-seeming smattering of options from Girls5eva to Manhunt to Shogun ; You.com gave me a bunch of out of date information and recommended I watch “the 14 best Netflix original movies” without telling me what they are.

AI is the right idea but a chatbot is the wrong interface

In this case, AI is the right idea — I don’t want a bunch of links, I want an answer to my question — but a chatbot is the wrong interface. For that matter, so is a page of search results! Google, obviously aware that this is the most-asked question on the platform, has been able to design something that works much better.

In a way, that’s a perfect summary of the state of things. At least for some web searches, generative AI could be a better tool than the search tech of decades past. But modern search engines aren’t just pages of links. They’re more like miniature operating systems. They can answer questions directly, they have calculators and converters and flight pickers and all kinds of other tools built right in, they can get you where you’re going with just a click or two. The goal of most search queries, according to these charts, is not to start a journey of information wonder and discovery. The goal is to get a link or an answer, and then get out. Right now, these LLM-based systems are just too slow to compete.

The big question, I think, is less about tech and more about product. Everyone, including Google, believes that AI can help search engines understand questions and process information better. That’s a given in the industry at this point. But can Google reinvent its results pages, its business model, and the way it presents and summarizes and surfaces information, faster than the AI companies can turn their chatbots into more complex, more multifaceted tools? Ten blue links isn’t the answer for search, but neither is an all-purpose text box. Search is everything, and everything is search. It’s going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google.

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Home > Penn Carey Law Journals > Journal of Business Law > Vol. 16 (2013-2014) > Iss. 1 (2013)

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law

Searching for an answer: can google legally manipulate search engine results, publication date, document type, repository citation.

Tansy Woan, Searching for an Answer: Can Google Legally Manipulate Search Engine Results? , 16 U. Pa. J. Bus. L. 294 (2013). Available at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jbl/vol16/iss1/5

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Google won’t let you use its Gemini AI to answer questions about an upcoming election in your country

If you want to ask Google’s AI chatbot a question about an upcoming election, you will have to do it from a country where there are no elections taking place. TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made in Gemini when they relate to elections, in any market globally where elections are taking place.

The search giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it started rolling out the restrictions on Gemini to limit surfacing answers about election-related queries globally. TechCrunch understands that the update is already live in the U.S. and has begun rolling out in India and all major countries where elections are taking place in the coming months.

The shift highlights not only the role that generative AI has been playing, and has the potential to play, in the election process, but also Google’s concern about how the service might get weaponized, as well as produce inaccurate or misleading responses.

The switch in India comes just days after India issued an advisory requiring tech firms to get government permission before launching their new AI models.

Queries regarding political parties, candidates or politicians now return a preset message.

When a query about a particular political party or candidate is asked, Gemini shows a message: “I’m still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.” In some cases, the tool can still be gamed. TechCrunch found the AI tool did show answers when passing on queries with typos. It’s likely that the responses will continue to be tweaked in a game of prompt engineering whack-a-mole.

Google Gemini restricting answers to election-related queries (left) but not when questions contained typos (right). Image Credits:  Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch

“Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses. We take our responsibility for providing high-quality information for these types of queries seriously, and are continuously working to improve our protections,” Google said in a blog post related to the move in India earlier today.

The update was released just before the announcement of the general elections in India. Earlier this month, New Delhi issued an advisory to tech firms restricting them from releasing their new AI models in the country without government approval. After facing some backlash from global VCs and AI startup founders, the Indian government clarified that the restriction was for “significant” tech companies and not for startups.

The advisory followed a mini-scandal over Gemini and the Indian government last month. The AI tool, responding to a query about whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a fascist, responded that Modi had been accused of implementing policies that some had characterized as fascist. India’s deputy IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called it “direct violations” of the IT Rules, 2021.

Last month, Google also suspended Gemini’s ability to generate people’s images after it showed historical inaccuracies. The company then said it would soon re-release an improved version to address the issues.

It is unclear whether Google will unblock Gemini for answering election-related queries after the elections end later this year. We have contacted Google about this and will update this story when the company responds. We are also awaiting a full list of countries where the update is live now, and we will update the post as we learn more.