Common Internet Tools- Google

Yes, I know that Google was mentioned a million times during the lectures on Common Internet Tools but I cannot think of anything else that I am familiar with. I use Google every single day, as long as I switch on my computer and have access to Internet. The Google search engine is my homepage so it is the very first thing that I see whenever I go online. The top right hand corner of my browser is dominated by the Google search engine tool bar - it is plain laziness on my side because I can skip the step of clicking on the 'Home' icon to go to Google, and just type whatever I want to search into the tool bar on top. However, I am not using Google Chrome or Gmail because I am already so used to my Hotmail account and the Internet Explorer browser. I tend to inculcate brand loyalty very easily.

The one thing so cool about Google is that they have this remarkable ability of creating something that looks so simple on the outside - the search engine page is so clean and easy to use. However underneath all that simplicity is a complex concoction of technical ingenuity. Another lovely feature about Google is how they often have very cool logos for special days and occasions. And when you click on those specially designed logos, they bring you search results of what the logos represent for the day. The most recent one was for Robert Bunsen, the German chemist who developed the Bunsen burner for laboratory experiments. All those times when I was doing science experiments, no teacher ever mentioned that the burner was created by Robert Bunsen and I only learn of it from Google, 10 years after I first used that thing. That is another flaw of the local education system.

Google is the teacher outside our classroom and I love it because it is so easy to consult. However, this 'teacher' may not always be the most reliable source of information thus it is up to the 'students' to establish the credibility of what is give to them. A lot of information that we obtain from the Internet, regardless of the search engine we use, are not as credible as we would like them to be (well, Google did create a really superb April Fool joke this year and I look forward to the next one). For instance, although many of us refer to blogs to get more information on the latest electronic gadgets or cosmetics, we can hardly use these sources for our research papers. Neither can we quote from Wikipedia due to the nature of editorship on the website. Yet, these sources are the most common links that Google provide when we search for anything. We can probably look to Google scholars for more reliable information but most of these links are inaccessible unless we pay for the information. Therefore, I was thinking maybe Google should buy rights of scholarly magazines instead of all those other fun things. It will make our researching routes far more easy. =D