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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Another great leap for lazy thinkers: My computer is now as easy to search as the Web.
Oct 20, 2004 | Call it "the Google news cycle." The search company announces a new software product -- in this case, Google Desktop Search -- and the Web erupts. The early adopters trample everything in their path as they stampede to sign up, while the blogosphere punditocracy simultaneously informs us why the new offering is A) the best thing since sliced bread; B) the worst invasion of privacy ever perpetrated; C) a security disaster waiting to happen; D) a brilliant but ultimately doomed play in the War to Control the Future of the Internet; and E) something that the Macintosh already had five years ago.
It's possible that all these things are true, or none. I don't know. What I do know is that it's not every day that a software program shocks me.
Google Desktop Search is billed as a way to search your hard drive really fast. While I was installing the program, I happened to go to Google.com, as I do about 932 times a day, to search for some odd fact on the Net. But the first result that came back from what I thought was a Web search turned out to be an old document that I'd long forgotten about, resting in some mildewy dungeon deep within my own computer.
It was alarming, though not necessarily in a bad way, to see that old file pop up. The shock was not that Google had instantaneously located the document even before it had finished indexing my drive. What flabbergasted me was how seamlessly the experience slotted into my already well-established Web searching habits. I've lived through years of hype about how "network computing" and "Web services" were going to make my desktop irrelevant -- that everything I would need would be online, so I could free myself from my offline chains. I've shrugged it all off: I love the Net, but I also have a fondness for my own hardware, and my own software applications. And yet, in one swift stroke, Google abolished the boundary that separated my computer from the Internet. From now on, when I search, I will be searching both. That's just the way it is going to be.
There is software that makes our lives easier, or more productive, and then there is software that changes the way we think. I don't know if Google is going to be the company that comes out on top as the offline and online worlds get mashed together, but I am sure that something important just happened. At the very least, I'm hoping that I end up having to spend a lot less time thinking about how I think. Computers are best when they allow us to be lazy. Google Desktop Search just brought me a quantum leap closer to the natural slackerhood to which I aspire.
What does that mean? Judging from my own patterns of computer use over the decades, it seems likely that most people who rely heavily on computers spend a fair amount of time thinking about the best way to organize their information. But our decisions on how best to proceed are rooted in the capabilities and quirks of our hardware and software. Take a very simple example: Back when disk drive space was expensive and limited, I was always making decisions on what was important enough to keep on the hard drive. Today, with a gigabyte of storage costing about a dollar, I no longer care -- I save everything. (Or nearly everything -- I still take pleasure in deleting spam.) In a sense, hardware changes have made me a lazier computer user.
Google, in its original incarnation as a Web search engine, made me even lazier, by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. Now, not only do I no longer have to worry about whether something is important or not, I don't even have to remember anything I thought I once knew, either. If I have a question, I Google for the answer. Dates, spelling, locations, who screwed who in Greek mythology -- I used to be good at all that stuff, but now, heck, who cares? As long as I'm connected online, I can find out whatever I want. This is comforting, and relaxing. Ever since I stopped trying to remember things, I've been way more productive.
Now, with Google Desktop Search, the world suddenly has an easy-to-install application that makes searching your own hard drive as painless, fast and familiar as searching the Web (provided, right now, that you fit the profile of a Windows user who relies on Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer and Outlook Mail).
But wait -- did I really just write the words "makes searching your own hard drive as easy and as fast as searching the Web"? Isn't there something absurd about that? The Web is, for all practical purposes, infinitely large, constantly growing, and packed with information uploaded by complete strangers according to no organized scheme. My computer, in contrast, is clearly finite, has been stocked by yours truly, and is organized according to my own best efforts at amateur archival librarianship.
How is it possible that it is more difficult to find what I need from my own computer than from the Web? And what exactly does the end of this circumstance mean for how I think about thinking?
