What if google does it

Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review , and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ.

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.

Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. In the world of , people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest.

The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. Maybe the Web would have a much more fractured structure and be harder to navigate, with an untold number of hidden nooks and crannies accessible only to geeks with superior research skills -- in other words, the kind of people who understood how to dig past the limitations of older and more basic keyword-based search engines. Less geeky folks might rely on a site such as Yahoo as their Web portal, using its directories and browsing capabilities to guide surfing, shopping and studying.

Absent Google, the Internet might not have wormed its way so quickly into every aspect of our lives. Maybe, just maybe, the constantly-connected landscape of smartphones and digital dependency wouldn't have expanded to the extent that it has. Think about it. Google's proficiency and expertise has changed the way you interact with the world around you.

Without it, you might have to remember more things, instead of pulling out your phone to Google as a verb the instant answer. Because if you had to fiddle with your phone for five minutes instead of five seconds , there's a good chance you'd either give up or look elsewhere for the answer to your question. And maybe your Internet experiences would be even better than they are now. But Google is everywhere, and accessing it is easy anywhere you have Web access. On the next page, find out how Google's omnipresence changes our world.

Google has its tentacles in just about everything related to technology. Mobile devices and business are two more examples. When it comes to smartphones , Google has transformed this market in a major way. Google's Android operating system, which is designed for mobile devices, is found on around 50 percent of recent phones [source: PCWorld ]. Without Android's spread, Apple's iPhone might still have a stranglehold on the smartphone sector. Businesses might also be different, as they wouldn't be able to rely on ubiquitous AdWords campaigns driven by Google to power their advertising efforts.

And of course, without the effectiveness of Google, ordinary students could have a lot more digging to do when it comes to research. They might spend days, not hours, researching a finals paper to make sure they found the best and most relevant sources, plundering the depths of multiple search engines which might return all sorts of varied and inconsistent results instead of leaning on the reliability of just one Google.

They wouldn't be able to search excerpts from nearly every book ever to grace library shelves via Google Books, the most expansive digitization of books ever. Without all of those accessible-anywhere Google apps , like Calendar, Docs and Gmail , maybe the idea of storing all of your critical documents online in "the cloud" , would still be in its infancy or reserved only for the most technically advanced users.

But the cloud keeps spreading thanks to Google. That's in large part due to Google's generous online storage nearly 8 gigabytes for Gmail alone and commitment to refining and updating its online apps. Both factors sway users into uploading swaths of their personal and professional lives into Google's once again, free products, which continue to chip away at Microsoft's Office market share [source: RescueTime ].

Google is simply everywhere, and people seem more than willing to embrace just about any product the company offers.

On the next page, you'll see that Google's bubbly and witty approach to tech is one reason that its users keep coming back for more. Google has successfully interwoven itself directly into the fibers of our society. Case in point: You don't "Yahoo" anything, and you likely don't "Bing" stuff, either. But no one even blinks when you tell them to "Google" a topic or question.

Google really is as much a verb as it is a search engine. And without Google, we might be using an equally common and much less interesting phrase, like "search it up," when goading our friends to find Web-based answers on their own. Beyond the name, Google has also affected online and business culture, stressing simplicity and fun. For instance, you've likely seen Doodles.

This information can also be used to influence the results that we provide to you. Learn more. Many devices, like phones or computers, can work out their precise location. You can allow Google and other apps to provide you with useful features based on where your device is located. On your Android device, if you choose to turn on your device location, you can use features like navigation, giving an app access to your current location, or find your phone.

This service aims to provide a more accurate device location and generally improve location accuracy. It does this by periodically collecting location data from your device and using it in an anonymous way to improve location accuracy.

The settings and permissions on Android control whether your device sensors like GPS or network-based location like GLS are used to determine your location and which apps have access to that location. They do not impact how websites and apps might estimate your location in other ways, such as from your IP Address. Depending on the Google products and services that you use and your settings, Google may be saving location information to your Google Account. This helps create your Timeline where Location History data is stored, and may be used to power future recommendations on Google.

You may be asked to sign in, and from there, you can view whether this control is on.