jd87: The Psychology of Google

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

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2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

The Psychology of Google

I think the people at Google have the hubris to know they're providing an essential service. Could you imagine using the internet without Google? Yeah, there's other search engines, but what if Google never existed? What if the bar was never raised that high? (I mean, it's a pretty fucking high bar. You used to have to actually READ the damn search results before you clicked on something. And they wouldn't always be on the front page, either. You'd have to teem through pages upon pages of search results, hoping that something worth reading would come up. There's a lot of bullshit on the internet today, but it's easy to avoid because there's enough [a quorum, I guess -- there could always be more] alternative websites with meaningful content that you can just go to these sites, these trustworthy sites, and ignore the rest.)

The whole "I'm feeling lucky" is the epitome of hubris, no? No other search engine ever did anything like that, because no other search engine company had the cojones to put that much faith into their first result. Granted, you have to know how to search Google if you really want to master it, to understand it.

January 18, 2009

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