Google: A Love/Hate Relationship

I can remember the days before the existence of the Google search. Those days when my web browsing 'know how' was limited to clunky search engines like Metacrawler, and Ask Jeeves.com. This was also a time when high speed internet was not widely available and dial-up connection speed was often the best one could hope for. Needless to say, this combination made for a slow rate of successful results when conducting web based research. Nevertheless, these older search engines were the precursor to the wildly popular Google search engine and Google's expanded network of resources today, like, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Maps. In the world of historical research Google has garnered a tremendous amount of credibility for its precision in searches and user friendliness. The versatility of Google and its applications has allowed a new generation of scholars young and old to praise the resource as a tool for pulling up precise information in a small amount of time. Despite Google's popularity with the masses, there is no lack of criticism and controversy surrounding the web site.

One of the biggest judgments made upon Google is its handling of the Google Books project. Google undertook the project to digitize millions of books and present them as open resources on the web. One staggering question presented by Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at the University of Berkeley, is also shared by the leagues of 'traditionally' trained historians: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right? Nunberg's article: Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars presents some of the concerns that scholars have with the project thus far. Misspellings, faulty classifications, and imprecise searching are to name but a few of the grievances Nunberg and others have with the project.

Elsewhere on the web, Nicholas Carr asks: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr, a reporter for the Atlantic reflects on the technological advances to the ways in which people read and write. From Nietzche's upgrade to a type writer which made his prose "tighter" and "more telegraphic", to the advent of the printing press which has persisted up to the present day, this article focuses on the ways in which our reading and writing technology has simplified our lives and by side effect, may be making us stupider people in the process. Specific cases, like the inability for people to read long passages or many pages in one sitting, are common problems associated with the way Google's programs have allowed the quick access to a world of infinite information.

So these are the concerns and worries of scholars. Will the standards of traditional historians and researchers come crashing down when Google takes full control of information of the digitization of books? It is possible that Google really is making us stupid, the future generations will be more familiar with scanning sources for value and content on the web than they will be pouring over library books in search for their information. 

These worries and drawbacks however, do not deny the superb value Google is to the historian. From my experience, historians will commonly advise against the use  of Wikipedia as a source because its information can be manipulated by anyone. At the same time, which professor has never used the site for a quick look up of a topic? Google has undertaken an ambitious project to make digital books available for free and preview on the web. Applications like Google Scholar are available to help the researcher locate more academic sources. These tools are available for use in addition to the traditional methods of research that which will survive with the digital era. The training of historians in careful research and analysis will not disappear, even if the format in which we gather information does.