A decade of searching

A quick look at the Google products we use, perhaps with the same regularity as we brush our teeth, helps put things in perspective. Within search options there’s Alerts, Blog Search, Book Search, Chrome, Desktop Search, Earth, Finance, GOOG-411, Health, iGoogle, Images, Maps, News, Notebook, Patent Search, Product Search,

Scholar, Special Searches, Toolbar, Video, YouTube and Web Search. If you like to explore and innovate choose from the following; Code, Custom Search and Labs. Enabling communication are Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Groups, Knol, Orkut, Picasa, Reader, Sites, SketchUp, Talk and Translate. For mobile phones, they have services like Maps for mobile, Mobile Mobile and SMS. Exhaustive, ain’t it?

Welcome to Google.com, the most important American invention, since Columbus discovered America itself. Thanks to it, India can take the credit for her Google Musician, Pritam. Lifting sound and rhythms has never been easier. However, for more original people like Luke Kenny, access to information has been everything. “Ten years ago, you would had to rely on magazines and TV shows to know what was on in the international music scene. Micheal Jackson was all that people knew. And now, any conceivable music you want is just a ‘google’ away. At the same time, it has made everything so short-lived. There is no curiosity or patience left any more. We want instant answers.” Copying things is easy but Kenny says that sooner or later one is invariably found out.

Playwright Mahesh Dattani admits that he cannot do without Google at all. “It’s invaluable as far as I go. I back-up all my documents on Gmail so that I don’t have to carry a pen-drive while traveling,” he says.

Google has transformed academics as well. Sociology professor Kamala Ganesh swears by Google for instant searches but always manages to pull up students whose assignments reek of copy and paste. “For scholarly assignments, Google is not too good. It is such a public space that you can easily get caught. Although I insist that students not take Google as the gospel truth, I admit there’s no doing without it.”

The addition of the verb ‘google’ to Merriam Webster (in 1996) turned out to be quite detrimental to the sale of the dictionary . “No one needs to buy a dictionary since then. The sale of reference books is on a decline,” says Kenny.

Travel, too, is just a click away. Yogi Shah of Backpacker.co.in has introduced many to the wonders of seeing the world on Google first. “Even if you’re staying at some place like Shimla Inn, you can spot it on Google Earth. The world is really at your fingertips.”