Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on.
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. Where does it end? Maybe I’m just a worrywart. How to: find ANYTHING on the Internet. Photo by Dullhunk Tips, tricks and resources to help you find that digital needle in the huge cyber-haystack. Learning to navigate the World Wide Web effectively is an important skill, and there are lots of different ways for you to find the information you are looking for. Whilst the following list of tips and websites is by no means exhaustive – and we’ve missed out on some massive topics except travel, which deserve a post in their own right – they should be enough to get you started.
Using Google Operator Hacks One of the things I love about Google is its clean layout – just type your query and hit enter. As well as the advanced search function, there are a load of operator hacks you can use to refine your search results. Here is a selection of some useful ones: And don’t forget if you want to visit a site that is down, or that your company’s server won’t let you access, you can view the Cached version to see a Google snapshot of that page from when it was last crawled. Photo by author. Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Wolfram|Alpha.