It has been said that Google has fundamentally changed the way we think. According the article Is Google making as stupid? (2008), which appeared in Atlantic mentions that "net seems to chip away the capacity for concentration and contemplation". How will visual search engines shape our processes of thought? Gazopa.com Tineye.com labs.ideeinc.com like.co.uk
OMG.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! how does google make people stupid? sure it links to millions of pages that are stupid but as far as search engine it is very good.
Thats because people with ADD are better at using Google and the internet and so the people who cannot multitask as well are trying to protect their intellectual turf. If you spent your whole life being good at a certain kind of thinking pattern, and punishing others who don't think that way by claiming it's ADD, then a technology like Google comes along and a person with ADD suddenly can search for thousands and thousands of things and take in more input while you have to focus on one browser tab at a time, well now you see the political motivation of such claims. We could also claim that Google enhances the learning ability of kids with ADD because now these kids don't have to concentrate on any one thing to learn at a fast efficient rate. This probably only applies to kids with ADD as people without ADD wont be able to take in information from so many different directions.
I can vouch for that. I have ADHD and Google is the home page on every one of my computers. Sometimes I'll think of something (that I know I'll forget later) and I usually go hop onto Google and do research on it.
it all depends on what you look at for information. it can make you dumber and smarter depending on where you go.
It is interesting that attention deficit disorder will often get mentioned in the beginning of a conversation, if issue is somehow related to concentration. Seems like I need to make few more posts to these forums to be able to post links, but you can find the article Is Google making us stupid by.. well, googling. I'm not actually saying that some type of thinking is better than some else. I'm just interested about how visual search would change the way someone thinks, not just at the moment when he is doing a search, but in every day life. I mean, people tend to get used to methods, which make their life easier. Easyness usually comes with a cost and in case of websearch, it might mean that user's will to contemplate -- an act of considering with attention -- or cogitate, decreases. In layman's terms one becomes lazy. I should have described better, what do I actually mean by "visual search". Visual Thesaurus ( visualthesaurus.com ) is something that I didn't mean, but I did mean sites, where one can upload a photo/image/drawing or post an url to such. Then the service will look for similar looking items that exists on website. Currently Google indexes a lot more websites than these websites, but Google has been playing their game for much longer. Searching for similar images isn't that new; sites offering stock photographs have or might have their own similarity search in mature phase. Reason why I think that searching by visual similarity might fundamentally change the way many will want to search, is that it requires a lot less cognitive effort. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that most of the people will learn colours before they learng language? Or maybe thinking with images is "more hardwired" to our brains, and thus words would settle to higher level of.. er.. thinking? Example. I'm looking for a place where some famous person once visited. I could google his name and probably I'd find a Wikipedia-article, which might or might not mention something about the place. Let's say it didn't mention anything about such. However, I have a hazy mental image of the shed, which filled most of the background of the image that had appeared in an webarticle that I read some years ago. I wouldn't remember the name of the shed or the city -- or was it some small town perhaps? -- where this famous person once where. By using similarity search I could draw a simple sketch drawing of a shed, upload it and adjust some values that affect search and submit a search. Adjustments might include an option that requires that famous person be visible in a photo, which have a shed on its background. Ofcourse I'd need to tell the service, who is the person I'm looking for. That I could do by writing his name or uploading a photo of him/her and giving an url to an image that contains his face or something else that would allow his identification. For some reason I believe that technology for facial recognition is already available. To make things easier, smart service would have a built-in sketching tool for quick drawing. My question is: How would getting used to these kind services change how one thinks and wants to look for information? Might he even become bored to searching information by writing letters on a keyboard? -- ps. About that ADD, which was mentioned.. I don't think this issue is spesifically related to individuals, who have been diagnosed as being or having ADD. It is related to everyone. It doesn't mention ADD. Actually, IMHO ADD can not be considered a real scientific disorder or condition as its criteria is flawed. See my slides at Slideshare: slideshare.net/persilj/criteria-game
Well, if you want to look for stuff on the I/net that will make you stupid, there's plenty out there, and everyone has free will to do what they want. However, it's also one of the greatest tools for advancement of general knowledge that's ever been invented, IMO--it all depends how you use it.
The general argument is that google links us to an article, which we skim, then we get bored while skimming and leap via hyperlink to a new somewhat related article, which we skim. It encourages a very shallow understanding of a broad range of topics (of varying intellectual merit) rather than a deep understanding of any one intellectually meritorious topic. As Alexander Pope wrote: With every second of every day, Google essentially tells Pope: STFU!
I think spell check has made me a better speller. Without it, I just keep spelling the same words incorrectly. But with it, when I misspell a word it is highlighted, so after a few times doing this I learn the correct spelling.
I uploaded my avatar and tineye.com came back with 0 results. There is too much information in a jpeg photo for example. Where as a regular search engine only has to search a few words (less than 100 bytes) a visual search engine has to search an image that can be 100 KB (1000 times bigger).
What we need is not visual search engines but VISUAL DICTIONARIES which will teach language objectively to all people in the world. We need a universal language all people will agree on. Most of the mess and chaos in the world today is caused by language barriers and differences.
