Googling and Gargling

Quote of the day:
“When we honestly ask ourselves which people in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
--Henri Nouwen

Google has become so significant that it is now a phenomenon. The internet has always held the promise of wide and relevant access to any information, anywhere. Over the last several years, Google has gradually been bringing that promise to reality. It is used and depended on daily by millions of people.

Google can track what each user searches for, and it can catalog and save search data, thereby creating user profiles. These profiles allow it to tailor advertisements that appear for specific users.

This ability has generated concerns about online privacy, and about the potential for theft or misuse of the data. The concerns are natural and understandable. They are the same concerns we have about misuse of any data that is kept about us--how we use our credit cards, who we talk to on the phone, what magazines we subscribe to, what organizations we belong to, and so forth.

The scale here is exponentially bigger, and that is what concerns (or scares) us. While Google will not have all data about everything, it can capture at least some of my business activities and personal interests. And do the same for billions of other people.

Although our fear of doing transactions on the internet has abated, there remains an undefined suspicion of technology. Over hundreds of years we have come to trust implicitly the process of sending slips of paper through the mail, or giving them to strangers at our local store, bank or organization. Yet many are still wildly suspicious of doing similar things on the internet.

I’m not all that worried. I admire Google’s incredibly audacious goal to be the worldwide database for all information. And I think the closer they get to that goal the easier and better all of our lives will be.

I like that it’s free, and if that means a couple of paid ads show up when I do a search, I prefer that they be ads for things that are interesting to me. Just imagine living in a time when I can answer any question by simply opening a small device on my coffee table.