One Hundred Billion Searches: Does Google (GOOG) Make Us Smarter?

comScore, the internet research firm, announced that more than 113 billion searches were made worldwide in July. That number is significant but even more astonishing is the 41% rise that the figure represents over the same month in 2008.  Google, as expected, has about two-thirds of the global search market. China is now such a large internet market that its leading search company, Baidu (BIDU), had the fourth largest number of searches worldwide, only slightly less than Yahoo! (YHOO).

Internet search is light years ahead of the way that knowledge was collected and stored before online methods began to become popular a decade ago. Experts point to ways that the Internet has changed behavior. People have instant access to news in every corner of the world, which lifts them from the ignorance that totalitarianism often forces upon them. Entertainment is much more broadly distributed than it was in the late 20th Century. Some analysts believe that interpersonal relationships and personal communications have been revolutionized by the rise of unbelievably large social networks like My Space and Facebook.

What is not clear at all is whether the utility of search engines has made people smarter. It is an epistemological question and the answer varies widely based on people’s backgrounds and work habits.

It may be defensible to argue that scientists have an easier time with research because of search engines. Their focus is highly specific. They probably use the Internet regularly, and they know, in most cases, precisely what they are looking for. They are, however, a very small part of the population of search engine visitors.

Measuring the extent to which search improves intelligence is probably impossible, at least in any broad and conclusive way.  An experiment might take twins who are five years old and track them until they are 20-years-old. One would have unlimited access to search engines on his PC and wireless devices. The other subject would have no access to the Internet’s most widely used utility at all. That kind of test might prove something, but is probably a waste of time. The child without access to search might be forced to the library for long days and nights of research. This child may even become well-educated because of the effort required to learn without “modern” tools.

Education experts in the US recently bemoaned the fact that SAT scores were not going up. They are actually going down slightly. One study about this decrease reported that the preparation for SAT tests causes young people to be distracted from real learning, the irony of the measurement ruining its own subject. A high school student stuffing his mind by memorizing facts that may will be of no use once the test is done has much less time to read Chaucer.

To measure the effectiveness of search on advancing the pursuit of knowledge is hard because it requires a decision about what the fruits of knowledge are. The number of patent applications to the US patent office has gone up sharply in the last decade hitting more than 485,000 last year. The number of patent grants has not increased over that time and is flat at about 180,000. More of the patents that are approved are from foreign filings than was true a decade ago. People outside the US are either becoming more inventive or have decided that having protection for their inventions in the American courts is important.

Patents, the cure rate for diseases, aptitude scores are all imperfect ways to measure the advance and application of knowledge. Even as a group they cannot be used to prove whether modern search advances learning at all.

The one almost universally lauded aspect of online search is its speed. Anyone who is even modestly adroit at using Google can get access to a huge store house of facts and analysis within a very few minutes. It is not too many years ago that the same research would have to be done by going over dozens of books, or research documents, or magazines, newspapers, and journals. The tremendous disadvantage to the disappearance of these kinds of research methods is that they brought with them a great deal of “collateral learning”. Research on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” will almost certainly lead to some amount of knowledge about “The Canterbury Tales”, if done in a library. The possibility of that additional information is less likely using Google as the method for getting information.  The trip to the facts is rapid and narrow, in most cases.

One of the most powerful arguments for the superiority of search engines as a way to gain knowledge is that what the user does not get in depth, he can make up for in breadth. It may take ten hours to research the effectiveness of solid fuel rockets to launch satellites by using a library. It may take half an hour on Google. That gives a learned person another nine and a half hours of education time using the search engine. But, that is not how it works. An answer is an answer and people who spend  vast amounts of their time to broaden their knowledge of this world and the ones beyond are rare, in both the realm of physical books and the universe of Google searches.

Search may add nothing to knowledge at all, even with its remarkable speed for reaching conclusions. It is easy to confuse the ability to gather information with IQ especially in a world where people can gather impressive amounts of information in impressively short periods of time. The problem is that there is no evidence that people have any more intelligence or sense than they did a decade ago, a generation ago, or a century ago.

One hundred billion searches and not one additional IQ point to go with them.

Douglas A. McIntyre