Life From The Search Box

When I was younger, my mother began buying a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica from the local grocery store. You could get your first few for $5 a piece, then each subsequent volume was $15–$20 a piece (I don’t remember exactly). I took her about a year to get the whole set, a set she still has to this day. All 26 volumes, one for each letter. The sum total of summed-up knowledge in the known world as of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

When I was writing a report on some third-world country, or when I was researching the rocks that are present in the East Tennessee region for 4H, out came those trusty volumes, their crackling spines and their smelly pages.

But then the internet happened and with the encompassing, and free, availability of knowledge, these books are now relics. Antiques.

They’re as good as kindling now.

Speaking with my wife and her friend Corry the other night, we stumbled on a new millennium truth:

Children in today’s society will never, ever know what life is like without the search box.

This goes beyond the mere ability to look up information on 1940’s China. It goes beyond using search engines to find data. It’s the ability to search for news. To search inside a site for a certain subject or topic. The yellow pages will eventually stopped being printed. There will come a time that if you don’t have a website or a MySpace account, you simply don’t exist.

My children will begin living part of their life through keywords.

The process of breaking down sentences and questions into keywords is a process we all learned through trial and error as we too struggled with those early search engines. You can immediately tell how advanced a user is by how they coin their search terms. Do they bother using ‘the,’ ‘and,’ or, ‘or’? A veteran knows these words are useless. Sure we sometimes include them in our quoted “exact terms” searches, but that’s it.

I remember Ask Jeeves was going to be the bees knees in the late 90’s precisely because you didn’t have to “keyword-ize” your searches. You simply typed the question and it gave you the answer…somewhat. When this ultimately proved fruitless and frustrating, we all went back to Yahoo or Altavista and slagged through that trash until the Great Goog came and we all learned what a real search engine could do.

Today’s youth will always see a car problem as “2004 Camry Transmission Problem [ENTER]” and not “Let’s take a trip to the mechanic and see what he thinks.” They will always look up phone numbers and business listings via the flashing cursor on the Google homepage and not in the dead trees underneath the telephone.

Asking a child to do a report without using the internet will be something akin to torture. Trips to the library will be trips to a museum: “Wow Dad, this is the place where you used to have to go to find the answers?”

When you have total information awareness, you have real world unawareness. These are the signs of our times. These are the changes that happened so gradually we didn’t realize they happened.

And as for me, I hope that one day encyclopedias aren’t forgotten or turned into relics, but that’s foolish. They’ve already become as much. As for my girls, I’ll be sure to raise them right, teach the correct email etiquette, and the correct way to keywordize a problem.

After all, times have changed.

Have a great weekend.

Up here so high I start to shake
Up here so high the sky I scrape