reply to u/Lauchpferd at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1c6ydzp/how_much_googleable_information_do_you_have_in/

This is the wrong question to be asking. If it were useful, then Google has everything already, so why bother? Let them do all the work for you.

Most note taking methods were evolved to not only aid in sensemaking, but to help people with the exponentially growing "information overload" problem. Sure you can Google many things, but doing so usually provides "facts" and rarely ever actual insight. Thus: discover, collect, index, link, build.

If you had to search every time to use a thing, you'd lose out most of your effort to the scourge of time when you've probably seen it before and could find it internally among your own collection of millions of things (with greater accuracy as well as reliability of the information you've previously vetted) versus Google's quadrillions of things which would all need to be vetted for relevancy, accuracy, and then placement among the thread of ideas you were attempting to potentially build toward. And once you've found it to place where you need it to make an argument or complete an argument, where will you put it? in your notes? And now you've come full circle.

Save yourself the time and only do the job once.

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. —Umberto Eco

Kaiser's argument for why building a personal index of notes is more valuable than relying on the indexes of others.

Note that this is answer still stands firmly even after the advent of both the Mundaneum, Google, and other digital search methods (not to mention his statement about ignoring advertising, which obviously had irksome aspects even in 1911.) Our needs and desires are idiosyncratic, so our personal indexes are going to be imminently more valuable to us over time because of these idiosyncrasies. Sure, you could just Google it, but Google answers stand alone and don't build you toward insight without the added work of creating your own index.

Some of this is bound up in the idea that your own personal notes are far more valuable than the notes someone else may have taken and passed along to you.

Do a quick history search on this town. Why was Brownsville the exception to not being governed by Mexicans?

for - dream research

Summary - This presents a new theory of dreams that challenge Freud and Jung's interpretation of dreams. - It is intriguing, as it posits that the dream state is the default state of the brain. - it makes more sense to me.

source - google search - does dreaming allow cognitive during waking state to be possible?

• https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2010a.html

Wow, it represented a 340 million USD bonus to switch from Yahoo to Google?

• for: Google search - dustcrete

• salient search results

  • https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/green-homes/building-a-sawdust-concrete-home-zmaz78jfzgoe/
    • provides exact mixture of sawdust concrete mix that has stood the test of time
  • https://www.matec-conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2019/07/matecconf_scescm2019_01015.pdf
  • https://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/sawment.htm
  • https://permies.com/t/128390/Wood-frame-sawdust-concrete-wofati

• next suggests search term

  • after reading MotherEarth article, search
    • sawdust concrete mix https://www.google.com/search?q=sawdust+and+concrete+mix%C2%A0&sca_esv=567951771&rlz=1C9BKJA_enZA881ZA881&hl=en-GB&sxsrf=AM9HkKk4FOVvC-tmNV-cfomdoa4nNgKvBg%3A1695541358540&ei=bugPZci2IJr-7_UPk5urwAw&oq=sawdust+and+concrete+mix%C2%A0&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIhpzYXdkdXN0IGFuZCBjb25jcmV0ZSBtaXjCoDIEECMYJzIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjIIEAAYigUYhgMyCBAAGIoFGIYDMggQABiKBRiGAzIIEAAYigUYhgNI1CdQihFY7CFwAHgAkAEBmAGzA6ABmSOqAQgyLTIuMTAuMbgBA8gBAPgBAcICCxAAGIkFGKIEGLADwgIIEAAYogQYsAPCAgcQIRigARgK4gMEGAEgQYgGAZAGBA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#sbfbu=1&pi=sawdust%20and%20concrete%20mix%C2%A0

• salient search results

  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352710221010950
  • https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/1094/1/012047
  • https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-023-05361-4

• next suggested search term

  • sawdust, diatomaceous earth and concrete mix
    • https://www.google.com/search?q=sawdust%2C+diatomaceous+earth+and+concrete+mix&sca_esv=567951771&rlz=1C9BKJA_enZA881ZA881&hl=en-GB&sxsrf=AM9HkKmDfU6vmkxzMcQ7lW0wXgkCLDRprw%3A1695546444454&ei=TPwPZZOfG46O9u8Pj8ef8Ak&oq=sawdust%2C+diatomaceous+earth+and+concrete+mix&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIixzYXdkdXN0LCBkaWF0b21hY2VvdXMgZWFydGggYW5kIGNvbmNyZXRlIG1peCoCCAAyBxAjGLADGCcyChAAGEcY1gQYsAMyChAAGEcY1gQYsAMyChAAGEcY1gQYsANImdUBUABYAHAEeACQAQCYAdcDoAHXA6oBAzQtMbgBAcgBAOIDBBgAIEGIBgGQBgQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp
• salient search results
  • https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/1087/1/012001/pdf
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950061821000842
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9605626/

https://highlightpoetry.com/

• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• for: search engine bias, google privacy, orwellian, privacy protection, mind control, google bias
• title: Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
• date: May 14th 2018

• author: Robert Epstein

• quote

• paraphrase:
  • types of search engine bias
    • the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE),
    • the Answer Bot Effect (ABE),
    • the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and
    • the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. -
  • Effects like these might now be impacting the
    • opinions,
    • beliefs,
    • attitudes,
    • decisions,
    • purchases and
    • voting preferences
  • of more than two billion people every day.

google search for "Ronald Wright surviving progress"

ChatGPT's synthesis of information versus Google Search's list of links

The key difference here, though, is that with a list of links, one can follow the links and evaluate the sources. With a ChatGPT response, there are no citations to the sources—just an amalgamation of statements that may or may not be true.

15% of daily searches are unique

Or, put another way 85% of searches are something that Google has seen before. There is no citation for this, and I think it is more complex than this because Google uses signals other than the keyed search to rank results. Still, an interesting tid-bit if the source could be tracked down.

I wonder how much Captcha technology may have helped to remedy this in the intervening years?

Broad recycle of Tim Bray's article https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory with an example of the same effect for their site.

DuckDuckGo has a better index that doesn't prioritize for "right now" or currency.

I think I've read this bit about Google forgetting from Tim Bray(?) before. Would be useful to have additional back up for it.

Not being able to rely on Google means that one's on personal repositories of data in their commonplace book becomes far more valuable in the search proposition. This means that Google search is more of a discovery mechanism rather than having the value of the sort of personalized search people may be looking for.

Search on documents returning something in the neighborhood of 500 words or so seems to be the right amount of information. One wants a few paragraphs related to an idea and not an entire book which takes longer to scan.

Google search does this type of search and it's also what Google Books attempts to do as well when searching specifically there.

Google

Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?

Bavadekar, Shailesh, Andrew Dai, John Davis, Damien Desfontaines, Ilya Eckstein, Katie Everett, Alex Fabrikant, et al. ‘Google COVID-19 Search Trends Symptoms Dataset: Anonymization Process Description (Version 1.0)’. ArXiv:2009.01265 [Cs], 2 September 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01265.

Beytía, P., & Infante, C. C. (2020). Digital Pathways, Pandemic Trajectories. Using Google Trends to Track Social Responses to COVID-19 [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yndb7

Public Attention and Policy Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved July 31, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13427/

Goldman, D. S. (2020). Initial Observations of Psychological and Behavioral Effects of COVID-19 in the United States, Using Google Trends Data. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jecqp

Bento, A. I., Nguyen, T., Wing, C., Lozano-Rojas, F., Ahn, Y.-Y., & Simon, K. (2020). Evidence from internet search data shows information-seeking responses to news of local COVID-19 cases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 202005335. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2005335117

Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2020, April 5). Opinion | Google Searches Can Help Us Find Emerging Covid-19 Outbreaks. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opinion/coronavirus-google-searches.html

Du, H., Yang, J., King, R. B., Yang, L., & Chi, P. (2020). COVID-19 Increases Online Emotional and Health-Related Searches [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5gskw

Very good advice.

Google has accelerated this by using search to better link pieces of knowledge in the modern world, but scholars have been linking thoughts manually for centuries.

A good resource to keep in mind for future lessons:) Found this website using a custom google search engine

This is a good point- typically teachers either give students a list of links or let them use google free reign. Creating a custom google search engine for the class may help

This is a great instance for Google's box that simply provides the factual answer instead of requiring a click through.

we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

...

What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

...

The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.

"Don't be evil."<br> "Do the right thing."<br> Riiiiiiiiight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

If you flip the words around to "jews are..." you don't get predictive searches. Why? I guess it doesn't think of the words as a question. Check out the related searches at the bottom of my page with this query.

How in the world can these results be so skewed? Is there an active community of antisemitic folks actually looking for self-justification or is this a gaming of the search system?