Knowledge Retention in the Google Era

Like many other college students, and people in general from my generation, I use search engines, particularly Google as a major source of information acquisition. As this project is mainly centered around looking into the nature of of the acquisition and retention of knowledge in the internet age, I felt it would be interesting to observe my own search history and see what I've been up to. 

Normally, it would seem odd for one to imply that they have not been aware of their activities, but it makes sense in an age where we are constantly being deluged with information. Unless one has savant-like recollection and information sequestration abilities, it would be unrealistic to expect a person to be able hold in all of these fleeting facts, taking in to quench an ephemeral desire for knowledge on a topic.

As with most analyses without rigorous control groups and protocol, this isn't meant to be taken as a serious study by any means, but serves more as a window to peer into the nature of these spontaneous searches.

I took a sample of 200 of my own Google search queries from several months of internet browser history. I organized these search queries using two methods. The first one is tallying them as either academic or non-academic, with these two fields being exclusive. (I  am aware there realistically would be overlap, but I sorted them into the area they lean furthest into) The second method was sorting them into four other categories, which are inclusive of each other: Knowledge(Science, methods, curiosities), Hobbies(Music, art, stories), Obligations(Chores, schoolwork, paperwork), and Rewords(Rephrasings and refinements to the search, either due to misspellings and/or insufficient results)

Statistic results:

Total queries: 200

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Academic: 12

Non-Academic: 187

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Knowledge: 93

Hobbies: 111

Obligation: 18

Rewording: 45

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Comments:

I was quite surprised at how few directly academic searched were made. This may be due to a statistical fluke though. To fix this in a rigorous study, one could sample the entire set of search queries of the search history, or pick a sample using a script to select from random dates. Unfortunately, I had no means to get around this.

Knowledge and Hobbies were about on par with what I predicted; a peek into the search history reveals many queries on science and technology related topics in line with my interests.

The spreadsheet with the sampled search queries can be found here.

The main focus of this project has been on the shortcomings involved with retaining knowledge gleaned from search engines such as Google.  But I also feel that there is a great potential for self-directed learning to take place if people seriously put their minds to it.

I am a passionately curious person.  I want to know everything, about everything, and the internet is one of my greatest tools in my ongoing quest for new knowledge.  The internet offers us more information that we could ever hope to read, watch, or consume, on almost any topic imaginable.  A lot of people will look something up for a school project or a task they are currently working on, but our overall concern with this project is that that information never makes it into their long-term memory.  With its vast amount of information, the Internet also presents us with the possibility of information overload.  We flit from page to page, skimming over basics and then continue on our way.

When we asked how many times a day they use a search engine on average, about 45 percent of our responders said 6-10 times a day.  

When asked about how much time on average they spend looking into a single academic search query via a search engine, about 54 percent of responders answered 30 minutes to 1 hour.  

About 52 percent of responders said that they "sometimes" read academic articles that they encounter, in-full, without skimming.  

When asked how often they look beyond the first page of search results when researching an academic topic, about a third of responders said "sometimes" and another third said "frequently."

About two-thirds of responders said that they click 4-9 links once they've entered a search query into a search engine.

About 62 percent of responders said that they "sometimes" further investigate the sources used in a particular search result.

This information suggests that students generally spend enough time researching a topic to get a basic understanding of it before moving on, but don't always delve into a subject in-depth.  This may sound a bit frivolous at first, but think about how having a basic understanding of many different subjects can add up over time - this can ultimately lead to a base of knowledge fitting of the phrase, "Jack of all trades, master of none."  I've taught myself about things ranging from what quarks are and how the Large Hadron Collider works, to how to pick a lock, to transgenderism in Greek mythology.  This broad collection of understanding is something that is very useful for me to have, personally, as a journalist.  After all, the more I understand, the better I can write.  The key to all of this is simply retaining what you learn beyond just the immediate future.

You don't have to be a journalist to benefit from this kind of knowledge, however.  Simply having a greater understanding of the world around you has benefits all of its own.  I mean, just think of the interesting conversations you can have that would elude you if you weren't familiar with the material.  You get to experience the world around you more richly if you know a little about a lot.

We have it so easy in this day and age compared to how our parents and their parents grew up.  Instead of having to make the journey to the local library (through the snow, uphill both ways), we have a global library of information at our fingertips, immediately accessible with the click of a mouse.  There is so much potential in that concept.  Anything we want to know, we can find out.  So ask yourself, what are you interested in?  What do you wish you knew more about but haven't had the time to look into?  I suggest you take a moment to consult your favorite search engine, and see where your inquiry takes you.

           Google has proven to be the most popular and commonly used search engine in the entire world. After two years of becoming a licensed corporation, Google had surpassed their highest competitor and other commonly used search engine Yahoo by their outstanding accuracy and incredible results. But how did Google become so popular, and what began this outstanding resource that many of us use daily? I pondered this thought after receiving the data from our in class project; Knowledge Retention in the Google Era. Through this project my group strived to obtain a deeper knowledge of just how much search engines affect our daily lives, and what amount of information we obtain from the data. Furthermore we developed a group on Facebook and mapped out several questions and offered a survey to our friends and family. After collecting the results for one of the question: What search engine do you regularly use the most? Google received an exceptional and quite impressive 91.3% against a 4.3 % other, and a 2.3% for both Yahoo and Bing.com. This brought the question to mind, if Yahoo was created far before Google, how did Google seem to surpass the charts so rapidly and effectively.

Many people would be surprised to hear that the leading search engine Google was created by a Stanford Student’s Research, Larry Page.  Page discovered how other search engines retract information in order to display similar results. What his research showed was a process of keywords being withdrawn from these statement, and those words being used to search for other similar or relevant topics through other search engines; such as AltaVista or Lycos. Page created a new form of system that instead used a sort of spider method when searching for virtual information. His new program had a much vaster way to expand and further the search engine results throughout time. His basic idea was the more individuals that used Google, the more sites that search engine was now linked to, and the more access to specific and relevant sites began to grow.

           Google was first only a search engine available to Stanford College students. Page teamed up with another student at the University Sergey Brin, and they created the first version of this now world known search engine. This was when Google was referred to as PageRank. After the search engine grew and become much more popular among the students, it was renamed Google, referring to the term googol, which is the number 1 with 100 zeros after it. While Google was growing, the developers (Brin and Page) agreed it was time for Google to become available among the public. They then presented their case to Andy Bechtolsheim, sun cofounder and venture capitalist who granted them with a $100,000 investment in this company. Google then became incorporated and even reached the Top 100 Web Sites in the December version of the PC magazine in the year 1999. At this time Google was known to receive up to 500,000 searches on a daily basis. In the year 2000 Google had finally exceeded their biggest competitor Yahoo and became the world’s most commonly used search engine.

          Gaining this information was not only very interesting but also struck me as quite intriguing. The amount of knowledge that a computer could access through key phrases and other online sources was simply astounding. I however am a user of Google on a daily basis, and appreciate all of the results I have obtained from using this search engine, and am happy to know that the search engine gaining the most popularity is also the most technologically efficient. 

      The topic of knowledge retention in search engines is an issue that influences every university student in this day and age. I can almost guarantee that every student uses a search engine at least once a day and more likely countless times more. In the age of smart phones, whenever you have an unanswered question or an idea you want to know more about, Google is but a few touches of your finger away. But is this kind of knowledge beneficial in the long term? That is the question that we wanted to answer in our project titled “Knowledge Retention in the Google Era.”

In present technological times, an abundance of knowledge is available immediately covering the most extensive array of topics ever in history, and this archive of knowledge is being added to every hour, every minute, and every second. But are we taking advantage of all of the information available to us? Throughout our project, we wanted to get closer to the answer, so we conducted a survey on Facebook of fellow university students. We asked questions about the way in which they utilize search engines on a day to day basis within the university setting.

The results show that while there may be an immense amount of knowledge immediately available through search engines, the rapidity and efficiency of search engines may actually have detrimental effects to long-term learning. We asked the survey question: On average, how much time do you spend on a single search query/topic when using a search engine for academic purposes? When given the choices: one minute to 30 minutes, 30 minutes to one hour, one hour to two hours, and more than two hours, more than half of the students answered 30 minutes to 1 hour. The findings show that students use search engines just long enough to get the basic gist of a topic, and then move on.

Search engines such as Google show some of the most simplistic, straight-forward search-results higher up on the search results—take for example Wikipedia. This enables students using search engines to quickly look at the most clear and concise explanations of the specific topic they are researching, gain a basic understanding, and then move onto the next. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great time-saving way to research, but is it valuable for long-term learning? When only searching a topic for 30 minutes, you probably spent a longer amount of time on Facebook that day, let’s be honest. Quickly reading a Wikipedia article for forty minutes will give you a basic understanding, but it will not lead to a deeper, more comprehensive grasp that will ultimately benefit your knowledge retention in the long run. University students opt for the easiest and quickest route to find knowledge, when in reality slowing it down and delving deeper into a subject allows for more beneficial understanding and a more well-rounded and rational insight.

Another survey result that further supports my argument that university students often opt for the quickest way to attain knowledge is the question: When you encounter an academically relevant article online, how often do you read it in full without skimming? When given the options: Most of the time, Sometimes, Rarely, and Never, the vast majority of people answered: Sometimes. This data shows that students admit to reading an academic article in full only sometimes, a further attestation to my claim that students only do just enough to skate by and no more. Students today will just skim an article enough to get the basic information, but when it comes to actually grasping the full meaning of an article, skimming just won’t cut it.

It is no secret that students in the internet age are used to lightning-fast information at their fingers all the time, and this high speed carries through to all aspects of learning, including impatience in reading an entire article. However, speed is not always necessarily a good thing. In exchange for speedy learning and ease of information we are losing a deeper understanding that generations before us had. It is important for students today to simply realize that gaining a more profound sense of knowledge is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than quickly attaining mass amounts of information that you will forget tomorrow. My belief on knowledge retention in the Google era is that the velocity and ease of knowledge in search engines is an astounding resource, as long as you take the time and really think about what you are looking at on the screen.

To collect data for this project, we created a Facebook survey consisting of ten multiple-choice questions regarding search engine use.  We each invited 20 of our college-aged Facebook friends to take the survey.  The graphs below illustrate our results.