To Google, or Not to Google?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Lb-ie4Lc

When faced with a question, wondering, or conundrum, many people instinctively think of one word…Google. The title of a common search engine has now morphed into a verb and adjective, as in “to Google”, or a phrase being “Google-able”. Without a doubt anytime a question comes about in someone’s mind, their first response is to type it in to Google and see what type of answer they get. Or sometimes Google is used as a past time, a way to entertain a solemn teenager who is tired of procrastinating on facebook, and has resorted to typing random words into Google images. The most common words typed into Google happen to be “sex”, “hangover”, “weight”, and “love”. Another top entry is “Tom Cruise”, but that may have only occurred after his well-known special on Oprah where he professed his love for his wife by jumping up and down on a couch like a monkey.

While Google is probably one of the most famous websites of all time, I begin to wonder why. Why do people trust this search engine more than ask.com or bing.com (who is rumored to stand for “because it’s not Google”). Why does everyone turn to Google before consulting any other website? Is the websites popularity due to the websites miraculous team of advertisers, or simply by word of mouth? If you were to ask a person about the most recent Google add they have seen, they may hesitate for a moment and have to think. The most popular Google add, if anyone remembers it, was from a past Super Bowl, and used pathos as its main rhetorical argument. This commercial uses logos and pathos combined to show you that not only is Google an efficient search engine, but it is also capable of helping a relationship flourish.

Although many people may not think about it, Google has a huge impact on our lives. As shown in the commercial, it helped a man impress a girl, find a place to marry her, and then showed him how to assemble a crib. Of course Google personally cannot be credited for telling him all this information, rather it led him to the best sites where he could find his answers. If Google did not exist, heaven forbid, all those websites with the information regarding crib assembly would still exist; there would just be no place to direct us to those helpful sites. So it may seem that Google holds all the answers, and that “to Google” is to instantly find the answer to a problem. But once looked at carefully, Google is only a gentle nudge in the right direction. Google may be there to hold your hand, but ultimately it is you who is left to search for the answers yourself.