Not using Google to get answers to my questions
I remember that when I first started using the Internet I was quite proud that I very quickly learned how to use Google to get answers to most of my questions. It still surprises me that even nowadays there are people who don’t really know how to do that, despite the fact that in 2023 that should be a basic skill for anyone who owns a phone or a computer.
But although my ability to use Google remained unchanged throughout all these years, finding answers became more and more difficult. This is not necessarily because the answers are not there, but because even when they are, getting them usually involves going through more and more crap that exists only to help the owners of the website you’re on or the creators of the content that you consume.
Most of the time, regardless of what I search for, I am presented with long articles that are written with word count and SEO in mind. This means that if I only need a simple answer to a simple question, I might have to go through articles that have 1000–2000 words just to get to that one line that actually interests me.
This is the case regardless of what I look for, be it a medical problem, a simple opinion regarding an operating system, a question about taxes, and so on. Instead of finding the clearest answer, I find the exact opposite — content modelled in such a way as to check all the boxes required to rate high on a search engine, despite wasting your time and not necessarily offering the best information.
For this reason, I stopped using Google to get my information. I don’t want to have my time wasted and to be shown ads when I’m actually searching for something that I care about. I want to be given what I need.
That’s why nowadays I get my answers from Reddit, Quora and any other website that has answers given by people who don’t have the time to write long articles and check for SEO and key words. Whenever I need an answer to a question I just search for the question itself followed by the word “Reddit”, and lo and behold, I am taken to a Reddit page featuring someone with the same question as me, where people gave proper and succinct answers.
That is not to say that I never use Google for anything else any more. Of course I do. But more often than not, if I actually need to know something a bit more important or complex, I would rather search for the opinion of a random person on Reddit than to read an article also written by a random person on the Internet that cares more about getting views and keeping a user on the website for as long as possible than about being useful.
We might live in the era of information, but just because that’s the case, it doesn’t mean that I need to spend 10–15 minutes reading article after article whenever I have a question. If I can get the information that I want from Reddit within 3 minutes, instead of having to spend way more than that reading random articles on Google that checked all the required boxes to become “top results”, then so be it.
