Our Google Conundrum

Oren Etzioni has had it up to here with search engine technology. Between teaching computer science classes at the University of Washington and working on the problem himself in labs, he decided to post an opinion article to Nature magazine entitled “Search needs a shake-up.” The fundamental problem he has identified is that there is so much information on the web, keyword-based search engines like Google simply aren’t cutting it anymore. He claims that with a large boost in funding researchers could revolutionize the way we search, interpreting our questions through natural-language analysis and finding an appropriate answermore quickly and efficiently. If you saw Watson on Jeopardy!, the IBM supercomputer designed specifically to take unaltered Jeopardy! questions (renowned for using subtle wordplay) and beat human contestans, that’s what Etzioni is going for: a natural-language question and answer machine. I disagree with the author’s claim that funding would be best-used on search engine improvement not only because those research dollars could be used in more essential areas, but because search engines such as Google have already wreaked havoc on the memory function of its users.

The author extols the values of funding research and development of new and improved searching techniques. He claims that we are drowning in a “growing sea of information,” and that because of the constant addition of new web pages and subsequently large pool of search results, the process of finding what one wants has become too large a task for today’s search tools.

“[Researchers] must invest much more in bold strategies that can achieve natural-language searching and answering, rather than providing the electronic equivalent of the index at the back of a reference book.”

Essentially. the reference-book approach requires the user to refine their question to within certain parameters to get the results for which they are looking. If you use Google a lot (and the fact that the word “google” is now officially a verb might be some indication that most people do) than you probably already know putting a question like “What do I do if my car is the radiator hose on my car is broken?” will yield less results, and more from less reputable sources, than if you had simply typed “broken radiator hose.” To accommodate our search engines’ strengths and weaknesses we have conformed to their keyword-based method. I certainly agree that people alive today are bombarded with more information than at any point in human history, and I have no doubt that putting money into database technologies could improve on the technology we currently have, but does that improvement justify the funding? Every dollar spent in the search for better searching is a dollar not spent in a different area, another possible technological improvement, a different paradigm shift. Why is funding search engine research more justified than funding quantum computing or improved genetic sequencing? Quite honestly, I think that anyone who is google-savvy can find answers to just about any question they have in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Is shaving off those seconds worth, as the author puts it, “an order of magnitude more of funding” than the $10 million provided by a US Dept. of Defense natural-language search program in 2009?

Not only do I believe the funding isn’t justified, but that improved searching is actually harmful more than it is beneficial for the human race. In a study conducted by the University of Columbia under psychologist Betsy Sparrow, researchers investigated the effects of current search technology on our memories. Among many other parts to the study, participants were given the answers to difficult trivia questions; some were told that the answers would be saved in specific folders, others were not told nothing. Asked later to recall the answers, the group who was informed of the folders showed a significant disability to recall information compared to the other group. However, what they did remember was the specific file names under which they could look up the answers. The results supported their hypothesis that people often forget things that they are confident they can look up at any time (through Google or some other tool). Using these tools, the brain has shifted from remembering the information itself to remembering where it can locate that information if the need arises. As a direct result of the level of connectivity we have to the information on the web, through blogs, aggregates, social networking sites, and search engines in particular, we know less off the top of our heads, and instead just rely on the Internet to back us up.

So let’s say that Etzioni’s request is fulfilled, that someone provides enough funding, and lo and behold, the next Google arises. It has the ability to answer whatever question we give it, faster than anything else before it. It crawls through billions of page hits and instead of giving us an index of everything that appeared with our keywords, it picks out the few that are truly relevant. It revolutionizes the way we are connected to our information. What would Betsy Sparrow and the Columbia team say? This kind of breakthrough probably wouldn’t improve our memory of the facts and information we look up, now brought to us even faster and with less effort on our parts. No, it would most certainly widen that gap between the information and our recollection of it. We now know that any answer is a mere breath away, so why bother to remember it?

“Well, why should it matter?” one might point out. With the rise of smartphones it’s not hard to believe that we could be connected to the Internet at every waking moment if we so choose. One might even frame it like the rebuttal every math teacher has probably heard: “why should I learn mental math if I can just use a calculator?” Those kids were right, they probably will have easy access to a calculator at any given time in the form of a phone. And if Etzioni’s appeal is answered, it might not be long before you will have a new and improved Google along with you calculator. However, most people can find a use for the mental math they learned in school in their everyday lives. And I think being able to retain general knowledge is some degree more important to your everyday life than being able to multiply fractions or estimate a volume. If we are given yet another level of connectivity to the “growing sea of information” surrounding us, it’s not hard to guess what the cultural norm will become: know next to nothing, but be armed with your smartphone in case a thought wanders into your pathetic, vestigial brain.

Matt Hugo

Etzioni, O. (2011). Search needs a shake-up. Nature, 476, 25-26.

Study Finds That Memory Works Differently in the Age of Google. (2011). Retrieved 10 October 2011 from http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/full/471027a.html
http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory