Today, a great number of people are going to wake up and the first thing that they will do is check their zodiac to see how the day is going to turn out, afterwards they will go out and talk about “The Secret” book and about what their thinking will bring them. It is likely that they will go to their “psychic” later so that they can find out what love and destiny has in store for them. Many will Google for more answers. We suffer from anxiety for magical and immediate solutions, for getting answers.

According to the US Dept. of Treasury, the religious fervor lived during the Civil War, allowed in 1864 to get coins minted with the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. A sign of this “secular State” living the oxymoron of feeling itself blessed.

More than a century later, in 1996, two Stanford doctorate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started to develop the BackRub search engine. Their success was such that they soon required a bigger infrastructure and a new name.

After exchanging some ideas, they decided on Google. A word-game with from “googol”, a mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The use of this term pretends to reflect its mission: organizing an apparently infinite quantity of information over the web for its easy location.

That’s how Google was born. It is said that it is the best place to work, Forbes calculates its founder’s fortune at 30.6 billion dollars and on fifth place worldwide on the list of the richest people on the planet. Why? It is not only a matter of their fortune, but of their capacity to influence the world, to offer anwers and make “the world an easier place”.

Imagine you are the owner of a hotel and that every time someone Googles words such as rest, fun, hotel, etc. the first name that appears on the search engine’s list is your webpage. Can you imagine having this advantage over your competitors?

Millions of students base their school work on the information they find thanks to this search engine; it allows millions of professionals to benchmark (look at what their competitors are doing and take the best practices), when people notice some change in their body they usually google their problem before attending a physician and many “creative minds” use it for “ideas and inspiration”.

Summed up, we are used to trusting the search engine—mainly Google’s—information provided to make work, entertainment, education, communication, even relationships and every aspect of our life easier. It seems that the case for the Western world is “In Google We Trust.”

Many people find it almost impossible to live without being “connected”. A few years ago cancelling television time was the favorite punishment for parents towards their children, now it doesn’t work much if a child uses Internet for their homework since they can find music, video, games, reading material and much more.

Internet is generating new habits and ways of thinking with profound implications for humanity. We are in awe before so much available information a click away, that often times navigating becomes a purpose in an of itself. While we are in the information superhighway, who cares where we are going? There’s the impression that if we want to find out something we merely have to google the right word.

To benchmark or copying and pasting everything we find on the net is not only unethical, it is mediocre, it is renouncing original thought: Hummer or Mini Cooper would not exist if they had been based on something already existing with the only purpose of bettering it (benchmarking); it is to stop asking questions to admit life principles that we might not even understand, it is renouncing new and surprising truths, it is to stop innovating and reinventing ourselves.

By making browsers our way to solve doubts we stop discovering truths and focus on finding them in the net. But Internet does not have the truth, only a lot of information and Google is not an omnisapient being capable of satistying our curiosity to lead us to the truth. It is just a medium for connecting inquisitive minds.

We need to recognize that humanity does not know everything and—more importantly—that each and every one of us does not need to know everything. Knowledge changes, what we now take as truth, a few years ago was science ficition, and in a few years will be an erroneous idea, an anecdote, or obsolete knowledge. If it is true that the future is a slippery target, our biggest opportunity to be right is to not stop questioning ourselves.

“Fortunate are those venturing in the world of Internet”. Googling is without a doubt a tool that can save us transaction costs; however, it is also a tool that can atrophy our inquisitive, curious, mind. We live in the world of answers, not questions. Is it time to change the world? I don’t know, it’s only a question.

Published in Opinión y Análisis
El Universal
December 26th, 2009