Google intelligence! Sure, search engines deliver, but what about the off-line world?

"Access to information" observed Bernard Robertson, vice president of DaimlerChrysler, "doesn't make you well-informed any more than a library card makes you well-read." But to millions of people, access to a computer equates to opening a spigot of information, which many Internet cheerleaders brand as "knowledge."

Notice how common it is for lecturers to provide students with hyperlinks rather than handouts? But everyone seems to have "drunk the Kool-Aid" as they say in the high-tech world--an allusion to the 1970s cult in Guyana where followers unquestioningly consumed a poison-laced drink. Businesses have grown dependent on search engines for all manner of things: due diligence, credit checks, competitive analysis, patent infringement, maps ... the list goes on and on.

So it's very odd for someone who uses online search methods for a variety of reasons, including marketing and shopping, to criticize the over-reliance on search engines in everyday business. In my business realm, I have heard of a case where a loan was turned down by a bank after a chance Google search on a potential borrower.

But this is not about knocking Google and Yahoo! or showing the inadequacies of search engines. It's really about how the Internet keeps us happy with superficial or inadequate knowledge gleaned from homepages. It makes us very lazy when it comes to digging deep for information, even though information on a search engine is increasingly managed and massaged before it ends up online. Based on the rankings of my blog, I get several e-mails from students and other "researchers" writing papers on some of the subjects I cover. How would they ever know if I provided them with less than accurate data or references?

Web sites oozing with information, digital archives and gazillions of links to other similar sites make us feel we are covering all the bases and getting more than needed on a subject. There are "Google hacks" you can use to get the search engine to delve into the bowels of cyberspace and find things ordinary users will never find. And then there is LexisNexis, the mother of all online engines, which allows you to search billions of documents in business, media, law, government and academia.

And yet? Let's be realistic about the Net. It came into existence in the latter half of the 20th century when not everything was digitized. Librarians and book publishers did not create the World Wide Web. Important events and documents, whether they are scientific, political, economic or in the realm of technology or medicine, do not automatically get into search engines unless someone creates a web site on the topic. The new trend is for Yahoo! to accept payment for sites to be listed and/or ranked, using sponsored "ad words" that give commercial sites a better chance of being discovered. But we still believe that the web is the greatest library ever invented and the search engine is the greatest spade ever for digging up any topic on earth. Before you stand up and defend the web, consider this story out of Harvard University.

John Lenger, writing for Columbia Journalism Review in 2002, relates an interesting experience he had when teaching a journalism class at Harvard University. His class included some extraordinary students: writers, editors, a lawyer and an Ivy League graduate. He gave them an assignment to teach them the value of reporting as a team, and the topic was deliberately about an obscure piece of land called Morroiconog Neck (For you power Google users, don't bother; there are only six entries that the term brings up, one of which is the actual article in CJR.) Lenger warned his students that the information that they needed for the article was not available on the Internet. When the teams presented their reports, it was evident that they had all used the Internet for research, even though the students had to pass Harvard's reputed library and archives on their way to class. Professor Lenger makes the point that in the U.S. alone, more than 300 years of records are not available in digital form, but it was extremely hard to get his students--mature professionals, mind you--to accept the fact that libraries and people are still the best sources of information.

If this is how "search engine research" is perceived by professionals, how could we blame average folk who turn to the web? Bill Mann of The Motley Fool, a financial information company, writes how the "information-slash-knowledge" misconception gives web-savvy investors a false sense of confidence. "It is not too hard to imagine people with too much information [being] even more dangerous to themselves," he argues.

People are fascinated by the buttons and hyperlinks on media sites such as Yahoo! and Google, and on CD-ROMs stuffed with encyclopaedic information. I must admit, I have a Google search bar on my browser! I cannot help but think of the passage from E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," whenever I feverishly click to buy a book, check a restaurant menu or look at real estate listings. As Forster wrote: "There were buttons and switches everywhere--buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature."

Today's web is a lot like that sci-fi machine. Instead of buttons, we have hyperlinks that seemingly open doors to knowledge bases, blogs, hobby sites, chat rooms and those vast cyber-labyrinths of trade and media organizations. It looks like knowledge, and it smells like knowledge, so it must be knowledge--we think.

But the web can certainly be better than the alternative. In several parts of the world, many people have limited access to information due to subscription costs, distance to reading centers or government policy. Indeed, there are places where people are punished for owning a satellite dish, where news is censored and where the only way to stay informed is via "proxy sites"--web sites that act as a sort of an intermediate landing place, so as to evade being blocked by the government.

But cyberspace is still a machine universe and isn't synonymous with intelligence. Should I be less critical, lest I offend the Google faithful? "Hush!" says the woman, Vashti, in "The Machine Stops." She is shocked at her son, who is weary of the machine world, and admonishes him, "You mustn't say anything against the Machine."

IN THE KNOW

SEARCH ENGINES

You may think you are searching a variety of indexes online, but these "engines" sometimes power one another. See how they are connected at www.bruceclay.com/searchengine relationshipchart.htm.

MANY ENGINES, ONE ADDRESS

When you want to deep-search many search engines, try this one-stop place: www.queryster.com. Here you can enter a search word for Alltheweb, Teoma, ask, Hotbot, Altavista and, of course, Yahoo! and Google.

FIREFOX

Want to view many pages in a single search window? The web browser getting a lot of buzz now is Firefox, from Mozilla. It's a free 13 download at www.getfirefox.com.

A9

If you use Amazon to buy books, you've probably used T9--for the search inside the book feature. But A9 is more than that. It's a search engine with memory! When you register with the free service (http://a9.com), you are allowed to save your searches, and leave "notes" on the pages you save! It's one level smarter than simple bookmarks. Another neat customized feature lets you drag and change the width of the columns on the results field to suit your browser. Oh--not that you weren't forewarned--A9 is really the Google search engine under the hood!

GOOGLE FOR YOUR HARD DRIVE

This just in: Desktop Google. No Internet connection required. Ever wished you could do a word search among all your documents, presentations and correspondence--even e-mails--stored on your PC? Now you can. Google has just released a search tool for your desktop. Get it at desktop.google.com.

Angelo Fernando is marketing communications director at Imperial Capital Bank and a freelance writer based in Tempe, Ariz., USA, covering business, marketing, media and technology. He can be reached at [e-mail].