How Google Search Misleads Us

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Many of us joke about outsourcing part of our brains to electronic devices. But according to new work by Adrian Ward of the University of Texas at Austin, this has been happening throughout human history, and it’s normal. “No one person needs to know everything — they just need to know who knows it,” Ward says.



Over time, we have had alternatives to find the right person: first books and other publications, and then the Internet, but it's not so simple. According to Ward's latest study, search phone number list engines provide information so quickly that it seems to us that we remembered it ourselves. And this gives us a false confidence: that we know everything.

Search speed
Ward's hypothesis is based on the fact that we classify the process of memorization based on how easy it is.

Weaving through a book to find the information you need can be exhausting, even if the book is right at your fingertips. Sometimes it can be difficult to recall the necessary fact, but it is generally more convenient. At the same time, the lyrics of pop music that we heard in school are remembered almost instantly.

Ward argues that web searching is more like a memorization process because the information loads quickly, is structured, and is presented through an interface that is easy to understand.

“Thinking with Google,” Ward writes, “which provides information with the least possible interference, is like thinking alone.”

If that's the case, then searching online can be like successfully retrieving information from our memory. And that's misleading: when we retrieve it so easily, it seems to us that our memory holds much more than it actually does.