UnGoogled !!

Thomas L. Friedman's book "The World is Flat" mentions In-forming as one of the Flatteners which have made the world a flat place and brought an equilibrium in the world where a University Professor in Cambridge has access to the same amount of research information as a kid in Cambodia.

With the kind of information now available on the internet it is almost impossible to go around without a search engine. If you are not using any search tool you are bound to get lost in the labyrinth that is the internet with its seemingly infinitely intricate network of the web equivalent of alleyways and streets.Its not similar to getting lost in a big city like New York where you can get around by asking locals and Indian taxi drivers for directions.

You can survive though without a search engine, memorizing or saving your most often visited sites in the favorites list of your browser. If you use a web portal you can get access to free email, news, movie clips, music, e-shopping all in one place and there wouldn't be much need of pretty much anything else.But if you want to look up some information and want instant results without having to read through hundreds of probable websites you will require a search engine.

I and hundreds of thousands of people around the world use a search engine on a regular basis looking for any and every kind of conveivable information that a human mind can think of. Yahoo, MSN and Google being the most commonly used search tools.

Google by far exceeds any other search engine in terms of popularity with its ability to bring up the most relevant sites from your search key words. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ( Google Founders) challenged the way traditional search engines worked on the internet looking for key words from your search.Google follows a Page Ranking technology (a mathematical formula ranks pages on the basis of how many other web pages are linked to it ) that combines with an analysis of page content, which determines which pages are the most relevant to the specific search being conducted. This enables Google to return the most accurate and relevant results.

I cannot imagine a world without Google nor can most of the post Year 2000 MBA passouts who have referred/copied/pasted/lifted most of their assignments/term papers/project reports from the results available from Google.

On an average I would do about 10 searches on Google and the max could be as high as 30 a day. I have searched for things and got results for most abstract things.I lookup words, phrases, history, geography, technology and even news on google.You can say I am a FAN of the whole concept that Google is all about with Gmail, Orkut, Picassa etc, all Google products adding to the whole experience.

Now imagine in the year 2006 a person working for one of the top IT companies in India in a managerial position that requires sufficient amount of Functional and Technical knowledge. What are the chances that he/she hasn't yet heard about Google. I would say almost negligible, that too if that person does not have access to the Internet, does not read any news paper and never watches the news on television.

I recently had the honor of meeting such a Google ignorant person ( who has full time internet access and is understandably quite well read too) who had not even heard about Google.
In a meeting I asked that person to look up some thing that we were discussing on Google, it came as a shock to me when i was asked to spell it for her. I had to explain what Google was and what it can be used for. Its almost as if not knowing Tarla Dalal when you are running a Cookery school.

I can only imagine what that person has missed till now, an entire phase in technological advancement has passed her by without she having the faintest idea if such a thing existed. Had she been in any other industry it would have been perfectly okay for her not to know about Google.When you work for a world class organization that is one of the flag bearers of the Indian Technological revolution the world over, this cannot be excused.

I hope with her initiation into the wonderful world of Google she has attained enlightenment from the darkness of ignorance and has taken to Googling by now and www.Google.com has replaced www.johnabraham.com as the first site on her address drop down.

PS: Images of John Abraham had started to load onto her laptop's internet explorer screen during that meeting- ofcourse by mistake - to her sheer embarrasment.