Nicolas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brain, speaks to how the digital age is transforming what it means to ‘search.’
In its original form, the Google search engine […] transported us out into a messy and confusing world — the world of the web — with the intent of helping us make sense of it.
But that’s less true now. Google’s big goal is no longer to read the web. It’s to read us.
… These days, Google’s search engine doesn’t push us outward so much as turn us inward. It gives us information that fits the pattern of behavior and thinking we’ve displayed in the past. It reinforces our biases rather than challenging them, and subverts the act of searching in its most meaningful sense.
As Eli Pariser writes in The Filter Bubble: “When technology’s job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens.”
Tip: To reduce the possibility of Google returning results based on your personal search history or profile, try using a different browser and make sure you aren’t logged into any Google service (e.g. YouTube, Gmail, Google-, er Google+).