Google (or Any Other Search Engine) Doesn't Have All the Answers

In this day and age we have become accustomed to seeking answers to all sorts of questions through the web. Sometimes it’s possible to find someone else who has had the same problem and has resolved it somehow, so he has posted something on some forum, helping people like us. However, oftentimes we depend on a search engine like Google for answers to our questions. This may be useful at times (e.g. for finding the address of that great coffee shop that our friend said that we've got to check out), but there are times when this is problematic.

There are some questions that don’t lend themselves to easy, straight-forward answers that we can consume in a website, even if it’s a good one. There are questions that we need to answer for ourselves as they are quite personal or in some way dependent on our own circumstances. I can google “best places to live in Europe” all day long but not find the best place to move to, since Google doesn't know all the requirements I have for the place I want to live in. Even if I were patient enough to list every one of these requirements in the search bar, it’s doubtful that this would help the search engine find the best place for me. Also, even if there is a website out there created by someone who has the same experiences as me and has found that location A is the optimal one to live in, it’s unlikely that I’ll come across this website on a SERP (the page that a search engine yields its results it).

The above example may seem trivial, since someone may argue that there are strategies where you can break down this question into smaller ones and use the search engine to find information for each one of these more straight-forward questions. Yet, even if I do that, I’ll still need to merge the different pieces of information together in order to make a decision. So, even then, the search engine is not going to answer the question for me.

Most people don’t have the patience to do that for the more challenging questions, which oftentimes require much more work to break them down into small enough questions that can be answered by a search engines. So, it’s quite likely that they will just rely on the generic answer that their equally generic query will yield. This is bound to lead to problematic conclusions though. Even if the answers in these top-ranking sites that Google yields are reasonable, they may not apply to each person’s case. And if the people who launch these queries take these results seriously, then they are bound to conform to a particular life strategy, where they don’t rely on themselves for making important life choices. This is quite problematic by itself, as it is bound to reduce (or even eliminate) any kind of diversity of views, leading to a very narrow-minded society.

I’m not arguing that we should not use search engines. They can be quite useful and conducive to acquiring valuable information that can aid our decisions and the formulation of our world-views. However, thinking about the questions we have instead of blindly following whatever this or the other expert says about the topic, may be even more helpful, especially in the long run.