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People too young to know life before Google can probably not comprehend how deeply uninformed we were before Larry & Sergey made knowledge searchable.


I feel about the same amount of uninformed as I was pre- Google, maybe more so being that there are now whole categories of information that I know are pointless trying to memorise.

What's really changed for me is that now we don't have conversations that peter out because nobody has access to basic facts, i.e. whose population is greater, France or Germany. Now we just look it up, end the argument and move on.

Of course this was possible with other search engines. Google's utility comes conflated with the rise of the smart phone and mobile internet, all of which happened around the same time. Everybody having access to the answer to every question in their pocket is the real game changer.




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