Information Overload

I'm doing some research for a video idea I'm working on that, in part, focuses on how students spend their time. Twenty years ago, the term, "research" would have entailed a library and a card catalog (on a DOS-based computer if you're lucky). These days, however, the term research usually means "Google." On a whim, I typed "research" into google. Any guesses on the result? 982,000,000 results in .17 seconds.

Google gives this stat for every search it runs. It's routine. It's mundane. You don't pay attention to it. It's staggering when you do.

In less time than it took to type this sentence, Google returned so many documents that if I read one each second, it would take me just over two years to get through all of them. More if I have to use the bathroom.

The funny thing is, once upon a time, when a person asked a question that couldn't be answered, that was it. Now, there is no unanswerable question. We assume that every question has already been answered, we just need Google to find it for us.

I for one become indignant when I can't find the answer to my question of the page of search results. What's funny, is that it never crosses my mind that the internet might not hold the answer to my question. I always assume that I just haven't worded it correctly. So I try again.

The internet is big, but the volume of information it DOESN'T contain is also pretty staggering.