essay on what is google

From the garage to the Googleplex

The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.

By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.

Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew). The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey's mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Over the next few years, Google caught the attention of not only the academic community, but Silicon Valley investors as well. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born. With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and former CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights. (The tradition of keeping things colorful continues to this day.)

Even in the beginning, things were unconventional: from Google’s initial server (made of Lego) to the first “Doodle” in 1998: a stick figure in the logo announcing to site visitors that the entire staff was playing hooky at the Burning Man Festival. “Don't be evil” captured the spirit of our intentionally unconventional methods. In the years that followed, the company expanded rapidly — hiring engineers, building a sales team, and introducing the first company dog, Yoshka . Google outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters (a.k.a.“The Googleplex”) in Mountain View, California. The spirit of doing things differently made the move. So did Yoshka.

The relentless search for better answers continues to be at the core of everything we do. Today, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Gmail and, of course, Google Search. Although we’ve ditched the Lego servers and added just a few more company dogs, our passion for building technology for everyone has stayed with us — from the dorm room, to the garage, and to this very day.

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Essay on Google | Google Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Google:  Google is the most popular company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. The term ‘Google’ comes from a mathematical word ‘googol,’ which means one with a hundred zeros. Google is the largest global market for search engines.

Google is an internet savvy market that has created a global impact. Its principal activities are to provide online advertising and search engine. Google also manages hardware and software products and operating systems. It has extended its business of delivering as well as selling products and services in over 50 countries.

Google has overturned the lives of people with its system of world information accessible and useful.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essay on Google for Students and Kids in English

We have mentioned two essays- a 500 words Long Essay and a 200 words Short Essay. The extended essay on Google consists of 400-500 words. The Long essay is a guideline that helps students with assignments and exams. The short essay on Google is written for 200 words and is suitable for children and kids with their classwork.

Long Essay On Google 500 Words in English

The below- mentioned long essay is for pupils aspiring for competitive exam and those belonging to classes 6,7,8,9, and 10, respectively. The essay guides the students with their class assignments, comprehension tasks, and even for competitive examinations.

Google is the leading Internet search engine optimization and provides its primary services with targeted search outcomes. It holds consequences from over eight billion web pages. Google was developed by two Stanford dropouts Larry Page and Sergey Brin, from a college project. The current CEO of Google is the proud Indian- Sundar Pichai.

Google made a life-changing announcement in August 2015, where it declared to restructure its leading subsidiary conglomerate- Alphabet Inc. This subsidiary was the umbrella company that managed all of the Alphabet’s Internet interests. While Larry Page upheld his position as the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai was nominated as the CEO of Google.

Fortune Magazine ranked Google as the first in the annual ‘Best Companies’ succeeding in other big companies in 2007 and 2008. Google is noted as the ultimatum of all the other global companies and is quoted to have a ‘high-energy working setting and fast-paced.’

Google is a tech company which comprises mainly of online advertising and search engine optimization. It also holds many deals, such as software and hardware products, along with operating systems. Google’s primary source of revenue comes through its online advertising field.

Google also provides online business for 50+ countries for delivering and selling various services and products. Google also has an enhanced home and mobile segment Motorola business.

Through its home segment business, Google provides video entertainment access and services. To provide access to Digital Television Services, the consumers ought to subscribe to Google services. Google provides collaborations with multiple technological companies that offer an infinite number of services and products, and the mobile segment sells and manufactures electronics.

Google’s Vision and Mission

Google’s mission and vision are to make the world’s information universally useful and accessible. Google’s primary vision is to systemize the world’s information, making it universally approachable. Their primary mission is to adopt and provide a culture value for its employees.

Google’s mission aims to provide its employees with a very challenging environment to work hard and have fun in a challenging environment.

Google and Rival Companies

Yahoo and Microsoft equally provide strong search technology and share a competitive market with Google. Google operates in a cartel sector with just a few rivals like MSN, Yahoo, Bing, Microsoft, etc. Because of which Google finds it hard to differentiate the consequences within the search engine.

Besides, MSN and Yahoo have targeted marketing systems to launch their search engine optimizations. Thus, Google is in a race to create a fresh information load that attracts and grows on its customers through diverse marketing networks.

Google’s potential concerns are the ‘Click Fraud,’ which is the most significant influence on their profit investment. In reality, Google confessed to paying many refunds due to ‘Click Fraud.’ ‘Click Fraud’ is an automated computer program. It occurs when an individual imitates a legitimate web browser user while clicking an advertisement. This generates an inappropriate option that leads to a pay-per-click ad.

Thus, Google has provided the world with the enhanced entertainment industry, with just a click. The term Google itself has changed the world’s way of functioning life.

Short Essay on Google 200 Words in English

The 200 words short essay mentioned below is suitable for kids and children up to 6th standard. The essay is written to guide the children with their school works-assignments and comprehension exercises.

Google is a global search engine optimizer that overturned the world’s way of functioning. The word Google comes to the mathematical term’ Googol,’ which means the value that represents one followed by a hundred zeros. The current CEO of Google since 2015 is Sundar Pichai.

Google was created and developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were Standford dropouts, who founded Google as a part of their college project. The primary service of Google is to offer its users with targeted search results. Google is the largest online search engine optimizer with 380 million worldwide consumers and provides information in 149 different languages.

During Google’s entry into the world market, Yahoo was the most used search engine optimizer. Within a short span, Google cut down Yahoo and other optimizers, beating them and became the best search engine optimizer.

While Yahoo and Microsoft invest in search engine technology in the market circle, Google maintains through an oligopoly industry. With low and minimal differentiation of its vast users with the optimizer, Google finds it difficult to manage and retain them.

Besides, search engine optimization, Google provides other features such as online advertising, hardware and software products, operating systems, online business, and an enhanced home and mobile segment.

Thus, Google has transformed the world into a fast-paced scenario with access to comprehensive information from almost 8 billion webpages.

10 Lines on Google Essay

•  Google is the most popular search engine optimizer and online advertiser.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin created it, American computer scientists, on September 4, 1998.
• The current residing CEO of Google is Sundar Pichai, August 10, 2015.
• Google released its first android phone in January 2010, which was replaced by ‘Pixel.’
• Google’s mission and vision are to make the world universally useful and accessible with comprehensive information.
• Google provides additional features such as hardware and software products, operating systems, online business, and an enhanced home and mobile segment.
• Google has over 380 million worldwide users and provides information in 149 different languages.
• Gmail by Google, is a free web-based email network provider, started by Google on April 1, 2004.
• Yahoo and Microsoft equally provide strong search technology and share a competitive market with Google.
• Google management structure sees the top management team and implies a high focus on value-chain activity measures.

FAQ’s on Google Essay

Question 1. What does the word Google mean, and what is its function?

Answer: The term Google comes from a mathematical derivation ‘Googol,’ which means one followed by a hundred zeros. Google is the largest and the most used search engine optimization that provides information in 149 languages from 8 billion webpages.

Question 2. Who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Google company?

Answer: The current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Google is Pichai Sundararajan, commonly known as Sundar Pichai.

Question 3. What were the founding fathers of Google company?

Answer: The founding fathers of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They developed Google while doing their Ph. D at Stanford University as a part of their college project in 2005.

Question 4. Who are Google’s rival competitors?

Answer: Yahoo, Microsoft, MSN, are Google’s competitors, striving with innovations.

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Google Essay for Students and Teacher

500+ words essay on google.

Google is named after the mathematical word “googol,” described as the value represented by one followed by 100 zeros. Google is the leading Internet search engine; its main service provides customers with targeted search outcomes chosen from over 8 billion web pages. Both Stanford dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed Google search technology from a college project. Thus, an insight into Google Essay discusses how Google works and came into existence.

Google is undoubtedly today’s most famous and interesting business in the globe. It’s the mission, according to its corporate website, is to “organize the data of the world and make it widely available and helpful” (Google, 2010).

Google ranked first in the annual “Best companies” of Fortune Magazine, winning other top businesses in 2007 and 2008 for two successive years. His performance as a top employer is due to his inner corporate culture the most quoted reason. Google is the ultimate global company and is defined as a “fast-paced, high-energy working setting” (Google, 2010).

Because Google is focused on its “young” internet-savvy market, its employees ‘ average age is significantly smaller than most businesses. Google’s median age is 30 and the distribution of sex is 65% male and 35% female (Linkedin, 2010).

The dress code is “casual” and laid-back because it values skill and hard work, not appearance. Google has a very engaging culture of the business. Also, Google Mountain View’s headquarters, CA called Googleplex, is intended to have a “campus-like” feel in tune with its predominantly young new recruits at the college level (Google, 2010).

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Google and Rivals

Microsoft and Yahoo both invest strongly in search technology and gain market share on an ongoing basis. 2. With few rivals like Yahoo and MSN, Google operates in an oligopoly sector.

Thus, Google may find it hard to maintain its customers with low differentiation within the consequence of the search engine. Also, Yahoo and MSN launch their own search engines and targeted marketing systems; Google is in a race to create fresh search instruments to attract customers and grow their marketing networks.

Click fraud mentioned by Google as one of the potential “concerns” that may influence its income. In reality, due to click fraud, Google confessed to frequently paying refunds.

In reality, due to click fraud, Google confessed to frequently paying refunds. Click fraud happens when an individual, automated script or computer program imitates a lawful user of a web browser clicking on an advertisement in order to generate an inappropriate charge per click in the online pay-per-click advertisement.

For instance, Network click fraud-you are hosting ads on your own private website from Google AdSense. Google charges you each time you click on your website’s ad. Its fraud if you sit on the desktop constantly clicking on the ad or writing a computer program that clicks on the ad constantly. Such fraud is simple for Google to spot, so smart network click fraudsters simulate distinct IP addresses, or install Trojan horses on pcs from other people to produce fake clicks.

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Essay On Google

Table of Contents

Short Essay On Google

Google is one of the largest and most innovative technology companies in the world. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Google has since grown to become one of the most recognizable and widely used brands in the world.

Google’s main business is its search engine, which has become synonymous with online search. The company’s algorithms and techniques for ranking web pages have revolutionized the way people find information online, making it easier and faster to find what they are looking for. In addition to its search engine, Google offers a range of other products and services, including email, online storage, and mobile operating systems.

Google’s success has been built on a foundation of innovation and a commitment to improving the user experience. The company is known for its willingness to take risks and try new ideas, and its culture of innovation has helped it stay at the forefront of the technology industry. Google has also been a leader in making technology accessible to more people, through initiatives such as its Google for Education program and its commitment to developing technology that is affordable and accessible to all.

In addition to its technology, Google has also been known for its corporate responsibility and commitment to social and environmental causes. The company has a strong track record of investing in renewable energy and advocating for sustainability, and it is also a leader in promoting diversity and inclusion in the technology industry.

In conclusion, Google is a remarkable company that has had a profound impact on the world. Its innovative products and services have changed the way we live and work, and its commitment to making technology accessible to all has helped to create a more equitable and connected world. Despite its size and success, Google remains dedicated to innovation and improving the lives of its users, making it one of the most inspiring and influential companies of our time.

Long Essay On Google

Google is one of the most important search engines on the planet. It’s used by millions of people every day to lookup information on a variety of topics. And, because it’s so popular, there are plenty of people out there who would love to write a custom essay for you that uses all the latest Google search techniques. In this article, we’re going to show you how to write an essay that uses Google to its fullest potential!

What is Google?

Google is a search engine that allows users to find information on the internet. It was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. Google has become an important part of people’s lives, as it provides access to millions of websites and documents. Google is free to use and can be accessed from any internet-connected device. The company makes money by displaying ads on its search results pages.

How Does Google Work?

Google is a search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It provides search results, also known as ” SERPS ,” for websites that are submitted to its search engine. Google’s search algorithm primarily uses three types of data to rank websites: the amount of links pointing to a website, the relevance of the website’s content , and the quality of the website .

The Benefits of using Google

Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world. It has helped people locate information quickly and easily for years. There are many benefits to using Google, including:

-Google is fast and efficient. Websites are indexed very quickly, so you can find what you’re looking for very quickly.

-Google keeps track of your searches and provides you with results based on your past behavior. This makes it easy to keep track of what you’ve been looking for and helps you avoid repeating mistakes.

-Google allows users to access a wide range of information from a single location. This makes it an excellent resource for research purposes.

-Google offers a variety of specialized search options, such as searching for images, PDFs, and news articles. This allows users to find exactly the information they need without having to wade through a lot of unrelated content.

The Disadvantages of using Google

The disadvantages of using Google continue to pile up. Recently, it was revealed that a major security flaw exists in the platform that could let anyone access your personal data. This is only one of the many issues with Google. Here are 10 more reasons why you might want to consider alternatives to this popular search engine:

1. Privacy Issues : One of the biggest concerns with Google is the fact that their data harvesting practices are not exactly transparent. They have been known to collect data from users without their consent, and store it for use in future ads targeting. Alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo are much more privacy-centric, allowing you to search without revealing your personal information.

2. Inefficient Results : Another issue with Google is their lack of optimization for specific search terms. For example, if you’re looking for information on veganism, you’re likely going to get very poor results from Google compared to other engines like Yahoo! or Bing. You’re much better off searching for “vegan recipes” or “vegan food” on those platforms instead.

3. Lack of Reliability : Another big downside of using Google is its overall reliability. From time to time, they experience outages that can prevent users from accessing their accounts or websites altogether. These outages typically last just a few hours but can be incredibly frustrating when they happen in the middle of important transactions or while trying to research a topic urgently. Alternatives like Yahoo! and Bing offer far more reliable search experiences.

4. Manipulating Search Results : Google is not the only search engine that can be manipulated to produce misleading results. Any search engine can be tweaked to show you information that is not actually related to the query you’ve made. This is often done by linking to paid advertising content, which will then generate more revenue for the provider.Using an independent search engine like DuckDuckGo will help guard against these kinds of scams.

5. Inability to Use Latent Semantic Indexing : Another problem with Google is their lack of support for Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a technology that allows websites to store and use data about the topics and keywords that users are interested in. This would make it much easier for Google to provide more relevant results, but they currently do not have the capability to do so. As a result, users are often forced to use Google’s less-than-ideal results instead.

6. Manipulation by Advertisers : Google is not the only platform that advertisers can manipulate in order to get their message across. Any platform that provides clickable ads (like Google) can be easily manipulated by advertisers in order to increase their profits . This is why it’s important to use an independent search engine like DuckDuckGo if you want to avoid being manipulated by advertisers.

7. Lack of Customization : Another major downside of using Google is their lack of customization options. They do not allow you to tailor your search results to your specific preferences or needs. This means that you’re likely to get results that are not as relevant or helpful as you would hope. You’re much better off using an engine like Yahoo! that allows for more customized results.

8. Lack of Competition : One of the main reasons Google is so popular is because there is little competition from other search engines in the market. This means that they can often charge high fees for their services, which can be a major deterrent for users looking for an affordable alternative. Alternatives like Bing and Yahoo! offer much lower rates, making them a much more affordable option when compared to Google.

9. Inability to Use Custom Queries : Another downside of using Google is the fact that you are not able to create custom queries (like you can with some other engines). This means that you are limited to the results that Google provides, which may not be as relevant or helpful as you would.

How to Write an Effective Essay on Google

If you are looking for an effective way to write an essay on Google, keep in mind the following tips:

1. Start with a clear thesis statement. Your essay will be more interesting and easier to read if you have a focal point or message that you want to communicate. Clearly state your position on the subject matter before getting started.

2. Use relevant and credible sources. When researching your topic, it’s important to use reliable sources that will support your argument. Be sure to cite any evidence that you use in your essay.

3. Be concise and organized. When writing an essay, it’s important to keep your thoughts concise and organized so readers can understand what you are saying quickly. Make use of headings, tables, and other formatting tools to help organize your ideas.

4. Use good grammar and mechanics. Mistakes in grammar and mechanics can distract readers from the main points of your essay, so make sure to use proper punctuation, capitalization, and spelling when writing.

Manisha Dubey Jha is a skilled educational content writer with 5 years of experience. Specializing in essays and paragraphs, she’s dedicated to crafting engaging and informative content that enriches learning experiences.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired ’s Clive Thompson has written , “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media , recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine , also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain . “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

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“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization , the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation , the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936 , the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor  carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management , was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review , and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek , Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus , Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading , as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay , the playwright Richard Foreman  eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001 . What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001 , people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

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Modern (1940’s-present)

Hunter Reid

Introduction

Throughout the 2000s, there has been one search engine that revolutionized the internet. Google has become the world’s most popular search engine, and many people rely on the website to search for information throughout the internet. The popular search engine as of 2019, attracts 94.7 million monthly visits and is the 14th most visited website in the United States ( Hardwick , 2019). The Google search engine serves almost like a library for the world allowing people to access a limitless amount of information in a fraction of a second. Topics that could’ve taken days to research 30 years ago can now be condescended down to minutes. Things like recipes, football scores, reviews, and articles are now just a click away. However, what makes Google so impactful and stand out from other search engines? The Google search engine has revolutionized the modern era because of its unique creation, its influence over the way society thinks and impacts the world’s economy.

Before Google was Google, it was originally a program called BackRub. The program was created by two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. BackRub was unique for its technology PageRank , it determined the relevance of the website by determining the number of pages and the importance of pages that linked back to the original website. In 1999, Google officially went out of beta, and in 2001, Google patented PageRank ( Bellis , 2019). Since then Google has exploded into the behemoth of the company it is today. What makes Google so revolutionary and gives it its competitive edge over other search engines is its PageRank tech. This algorithm is what allows Google to find the most relevant webpages quickly, and in today’s society of information, it is crucial for people to find relevant and important data quickly. This why other search engines such as Bing fail in this aspect to living up to monolith that is Google. They are not able to compete in this regard to bring useful and relevant information quickly to the user. Google has also kept expanding its search engine with the creation of other search engines such as Google Scholar which allows the user to sort through academic articles. It is also important to note how Google indexes information and brings what a user is specifically looking for at the top of the list. Google states on their website, “in a fraction of a second, Google’s search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results for what you’re looking for” ( Google , 2019). People now no longer have to scour through other information to find the specific info. The most relevant information the user needs is all right there in a short concise manner, and this change has also dramatically changed how modern society functions.

Societal Impact

Google has been around for 20 years now and most millennials have grown up with Google always being a part of their lives. This has caused a huge shift in demographics between millennials and baby boomers. While the older generation grew up researching information the traditional way the new generation has grown up with the information being readily available. This changed how people in society think and function. Rothman writes in her Time magazine article how the search engine changes the way people organize information,

“The more we use services like Google, the more our brains organize the world in an index -based fashion. This also means people who make a living providing information are increasingly organizing their presentation to catch eyeballs looking for specific details in indexes. As a result, the way we interact with information is largely more disjointed than it was for our ancestors” ( Rothman , 2018).

In the traditional way of research, people would have to sort through information on their own and would unintentionally learn other aspects of a topic while they were searching for something specific about the topic. Now with information so readily available, organized society no longer sees the big picture and has transitioned into only caring about the fine details. In today’s fast-paced society some may consider this a positive shift. People need to be able to find information quickly and concisely. However, some consider this shift to be negative as people are becoming dissociated with information and are no longer enveloping themselves into the topic. Everyone wants their information straight to the point by being short, quick, and concise. People are no longer watching the full game anymore and are instead they are only watching the highlights. Carr in his academic article describes how Google inhibits the way he reads, “Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” ( Carr , 2008).

One could argue that this is causing people to be less intelligent, as gaps in information are not allowing people to fully understand a topic. Time is valuable, and people would much rather have something summarized in a few sentences than an in-depth analysis of the topic. While this does have some major drawbacks, it allows people to work more quickly and efficiently. Google has sped up the production of the world for better or for worse.

Economic Impact

Google has also affected the world in a tangible way. The search for keywords and trends in the search engine are valuable information for companies.  Choi and Varian describe in their academic article on how companies use Google Trends to predict the market, “Google Trends, which is a real‐time daily and weekly index of the volume of queries that users enter into Google. We have found that these query indices are often correlated with various economic indicators and may be helpful for short‐term economic prediction. For example, the volume of queries on automobile sales during the second week in June may be helpful in predicting the June auto sales report which is released several weeks later in July” ( Choi and Varian , 2012).

Being able to see what people are interested in at any point in time has changed the way companies operate. This change can be seen in the way companies now advertise products. No longer are the days of marketing to demographics and hoping an ad reaches a potential consumer. Now companies can quickly see what people are searching for and what is popular in any given country. This has caused the economy to expand and has been contributing factors to globalization . Companies being able to see what is popular in a foreign country allows them to make better marketing strategies and creates opportunities to enter new markets. However, not everyone sees this tool as a positive one. Google has come under controversy with people saying Google keeping track of their search data is an invasion of privacy, and others feel that it is just the cost of free information. So, what makes so many people flock to Google even though people are aware they are being tracked? Hendrix in his article puts it best, “Of course, the real value of Google to you and I is Google itself. We search the world’s knowledge for free and increasingly sync it with the physical world through Maps and even, soon, driverless cars. Freely flowing data break down barriers of language or power supercomputers in the palm of our hands. In the ongoing conversation between man and machine, we are the ones who have the last say” ( Hendrix , 2016). With information becoming more available because of Google one can only imagine what the next steps are for the company and if the abundance of information will benefit or hurt humanity in the long run.

Google revolutionized the search engine game. It is hard to imagine daily life without the popular website. The Google search engine has dramatically changed the modern era because of its unique creation PageRank , its influence over the way society thinks, and its impact on the world’s economy. Google has brought people closer together and allowed people to educate themselves on a variety of topics. While there are some drawbacks the search engine has brought on society, overall it has benefited society.

Chapter Questions

• Short Answer: What is the name of Google’s algorithm that determines relevance through searching the number of pages and the importance of pages on a website?
• Short Answer: What are some examples of the way Google has affected how society thinks?
• Short Answer: Give an example of how Google has impacted the modern economic landscape.

Bellis, M. (2019, January 18). Google: The Story Behind One of the Richest Companies in the World. Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-google-1991852 .

Carr, N. (2008, December 9). Is Google Making Us Stupid? Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Choi, H., & Varian, H. (2012, June 27). Predicting the Present with Google Trends. Economic Record , 88(1), 2-9.  Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.libproxy.clemson.edu/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2012.00809.x .

Google. (2019). How Search Works. Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/ .

Hardwick, J. (2019, June 27). Top 100 Most Visited Websites by Search Traffic (as of 2019). Retrieved October 7, 2019, from https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-visited-websites/ .

Hendrix, M. (2016, June 27). Google’s Ever-Growing Impact on the Global Economy.  U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation . Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/blog/post/googles-ever-growing-impact-global-economy .

Rothman, L. (2018, September 4). How Google Changed the Whole Way We Think About Information. Time. Retrieved October 8, 2019, from https://time.com/5383389/google-history-search-information/ .

“The Google search homepage, viewed in Google Chrome.”  by  Google Inc.  is in the  Public Domain

Braincraft. (2013) Is Google Killing Your Memory? https://youtu.be/qoFMGLTjUTM

To the extent possible under law, Hunter Reid has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Science, Technology, & Society: A Student-Led Exploration , except where otherwise noted.

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For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

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• Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
• Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

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The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

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Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

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The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

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To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

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After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

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A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

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Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

24 pages • 48 minutes read

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Summary: “is google making us stupid”.

The essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was written by Nicholas Carr . It was originally published in The Atlantic ’s July/August 2008 issue. The essay stirred much debate, and in 2010, Carr published an extended version of the essay in book form, entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

The essay begins and ends with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the initial allusion, Carr summarizes the moment toward the end of the film in which “the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene [...] Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial ‘brain.’ ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says, forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’” (1). Carr uses this allusion to assert that he, like HAL, has had a growing feeling that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (2). He feels that his brain has changed the way it processes information and thinks. He finds it increasingly more difficult to read deeply and with subtlety, as he loses his concentration and gets distracted and restless while reading. He attributes this change to the increase in his use of the Internet.

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Carr states that he’s not alone in this as the Internet quickly becomes a “universal medium” (4). While he concedes that the Internet has provided the gift of “immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information,” he also cites the media theorist Marshal McLuhan’s more complicated observation: “[M]edia are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (4). Carr asserts that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (4). He then offers that many of his literarily-inclined friends are also observing a similar phenomenon in their own lives.

Carr points out that these anecdotes do not offer empirical proof of anything, and scientific experiments on “the long-term neurological and psychological” effects of the Internet have not yet been completed (7). However, he cites a recent study published by the University College of London that “suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think” (7). The college’s five-year study observed “computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information: “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited” (7). The authors of the study ultimately concluded that readers are not reading Internet materials the way that they would read materials in more traditional media—and that the Internet is creating a new paradigm of reading, “as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins” (7).

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Carr observes that the proliferation of text on both the Internet and via text messaging has likely increased the amount that people read: “But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self,” he says (8). He then cites Maryanne Wolf , the developmental psychologist at Tufts University who wrote the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. He writes, “Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press , made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (8).

Carr then paraphrases some of Wolf’s ideas. He highlights her assertion that reading is not an instinctual human trait: “We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains” (9). He therefore concludes that the neural circuits created by human use of the Internet will inevitably differ from those created in previous eras when books and other printed media were the norm. He also offers an anecdote that supports this point: Friedrich Nietzsche switched from pen and paper to a typewriter for composing his writing in 1882. Nietzsche’s friend soon noticed that the man’s writing took on a different quality as a result—becoming “tighter” and “telegraphic” (11).

Carr reminds his reader of the plasticity of the human brain, asserting that even the adult human brain “routinely [breaks] old connections and [forms] new ones” (13). Carr then defines “intellectual technologies” as “tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities” (14). He says that “we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies” (14). He uses the invention of the clock to prove this point, citing the cultural critic Lewis Mumford to assert that the ubiquity of the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences” (14). Carr asserts that this phenomena helped bring “the scientific mind and the scientific man” into being—but that it also took something away: “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock” (15).

Carr asserts that this change extends beyond mere human action and into human biology and cognition. He cites the 1936 writings of Alan Turing, which predicted that the tremendous computing power of the digital computers would lead to their usurpation of preexisting forms of technology. Carr sees this happening as the Internet becomes “our map and clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (17). Carr observes that “when the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image” (18). He cites The New York Times ’ decision to “devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts” to provide print readers with a similar experience to Internet readers as an example of this phenomenon (17). He then asserts that no other form of media has had as powerful an influence over human thought than the Internet, and that we have not spent enough time poring over “how, exactly, [the Internet] is reprogramming us” (20). He concludes that “[t]he Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure” (20).

Carr then informs us that, around the same time Nietzsche switched to a typewriter, a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor invented a regimented program that separated every element of steel plant machinists’ jobs into “a sequence of small discrete steps” (21). Taylor then tested different methods of completing each step to develop “a set of precise instructions—an ‘algorithm,’ we might say today—for how each worker should work” (21). This caused a sizeable increase in productivity—although many machinists felt that the system transformed them into mere robots. However, Taylor’s system was quickly adopted by manufacturers domestically and internationally: “Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well,” Carr asserts (23).

Carr uses Google’s mandate to “systematize everything,” as well as the company CEOs’ stated desire to perfect its search engine to eventually perfect artificial intelligence as proof of this (24). Carr writes, “[Google’s] easy assumption that we’d all ‘be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized” (28). Carr also points out that this regimentation of the human mind “is the [Internet’s] reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements” (29). In this atmosphere , it hurts the bottom line of such advertisers to promote the slow, considered reading and thinking pace of previous eras.

Carr then admits that he may be overly anxious in his assertions. He concedes that every introduction of a major new technology was attended to by naysayers. He states that it’s perfectly possible that the utopian prognostications and potential of the Internet could happen. However, he cites Wolf’s argument that “deep reading […] is indistinguishable from deep thinking” to shore up his own credibility (32): “If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture,” Carr posits (33). For Carr, this process is, in the words of the playwright Richard Foreman, “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’” (33). 

Carr then circles back to the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene with which he opened the essay. He notes that the computer HAL’s pleas were the most human aspect of the scene, contrasted against “the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm” (34). He fears that human intelligence will become oversimplified and impoverished into artificial intelligence if our society continues to rely too uncritically “on computers to mediate our understanding of the world” (34).

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“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr Essay

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Introduction

Works cited.

We were at the meeting five years ago, and one question was posed, “Is electronic media likely to substitute the traditional media in a few years to come”? Everybody agreed that electronic media was first taking over from traditional sources of information. Only a few of us held that although electronic media is pushing print media out of business, people believe in seeing and touching, as such, print media will still have its way. After finding or looking for information on the Internet, people will still be perusing through books to confirm its truthfulness. This paper refutes the idea that electronic media reduces the ability of people to think and that it will substitute print media any time soon.

Nicholas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” mainly discusses the basis and impact of the way the Internet affects or impacts our reading, reasoning, and writing habits as well as the way our brains are trying to adapt to the changing times in the media industry (Carr para. 3). Carr employs the use of specific examples, as well as statistics, to explain his standpoint even though many people do not agree with it. In the first part of the article, the author argues whether our ways of writing and reading are impacted by Google’s search engine. He states, “Having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial” (par. 1).

Nicholas Carr strongly criticizes not just Google, but also its highly advanced toolbars as he thinks that they will one time turn human beings into machines like creatures. “When we use the Internet, we become mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret the text and to make the rich mental connections….remains largely disengaged” (par. 9). Given that the issue brought up by the author is very important, he provides very detailed instances to prove his standpoint.

The information and statistics employed in this article are very specific and cautiously checked. For instance, from the start, the author comes with a range of conspicuous examples to trap the attention of readers. Then, he sneaks in his rational discussion to demonstrate that Google is actually making people, especially those who use the Internet, lazier, and more mechanical. He states, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense…, it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (par. 8).

In the end, the author emphasizes that by relying on the Internet for information, we sacrifice the traditional culture that enhanced our thinking capacity. It is like sacrificing what is noble in our lives. “Internet is not the alphabet, and even if it may replace the printing media, it produces something that is different altogether…. deep reading promoted by a sequence of print media” (par. 33).

From the standpoint of Carr, the first thing to ponder or question is whether, as alleged in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” whether human beings are actually becoming more scattered and superficial in their thinking. Throughout his article, the author does not, in any way, celebrate the change in technology. He mainly sees change as a big loss. This, in fact, makes his criticism more superficial and completely misses out on the humanizing aspects of the Web. As a point of fact, it is always easy to criticize any new thing because we have not yet tested its positive sides. In addition, it is very difficult to understand the capabilities that new technology can bring to the life of humans.

In fact, what Carr describes is all about the worry of how we read and write. He must understand that the Net has actually brought a new style of reading. The way we listen to group members in a discussion without being changed into “machine-like” is similar to our reading on the Internet. The Internet is more like listening to a number of people talking. At the end of the day, we find ourselves not changed in any way by the net.

We still find ourselves in the natural state we were before. In fact, different from Carr’s insinuation, we find ourselves continually generating knowledge as our social contacts keep expanding on the Web. With the net, we have actually discovered novel ways of enjoying learning, particularly in a social environment. With this, the answer is “no”, Google is not and will never make us stupid. The only what online platform is actually doing is assisting us in reclaiming our lost learning legacy through a faster exchange of information and ideas in a social environment. Google is, in fact, shaping and making us smarter through the process of re-discovering new ways of learning.

The argument of Carr also fails to convince the reader, particularly when it comes to surfing the Web. Carr indicates that with the Internet, activities in the cognitive part of the brain have completely vanished. As he states, “the variations extend to regions of the brain, as well as those that govern such essential cognitive functions…… our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works” (par. 10).

This is not based on science. In 2009, researchers at the University of California established that searches on the Internet result in enhanced activity in the prefrontal part of the brain, related to traditional reading style. In fact, it is this part of the brain that determines or controls skills such as deliberate analysis and selective attention. Carr indicates that all these skills have disappeared with the increased use of the Internet. As such, Google and the Web, in general, are not making us stupid, in fact, it is exercising and refreshing the parts of the brain that make people better in terms of reading, writing, and even thinking.

However, it must be recognized that this does not mean that the Internet has no side effects on those who use it. Every invention has a lot of good things and bad things on equal measure. Taking into account the Pavlov experiment of conditioned reflex, kids, who are continuously predisposed to binary numbers, take in large visual information, and a large area, that was previously allocated to object recognition, is taken up by visual recognition. Ultimately, literate humans are less introduced to natural details, an aspect that will not even enable them to read the written texts.

The article by Carr reminds me of Plato’s assertion or criticism of the art of writing when it was newly invented. In his dialog “Phaedrus”, he stated, “This invention of yours will lead to forgetfulness in the souls of learners, as they will not utilize their thinking capacities; they will rely and trust the externally drafted characters and fail remember anything…they will be people who fancy listening things that are said by other and fail to learn completely…” When the article is deeply analyzed, Carr seems to have quoted this text particularly when criticizing the print media. He stated, “The easy availability of written materials would result intellectual laziness….and weakening their minds… demean the work of intellectuals and spread falsehood” (par. 32).

In fact, these lines in his article weakened his line of thought more than what they were intended to deliver. They lay out a number of challenges associated with the Internet that Carr failed to specify in his argument.

In the end, the argument of Carr revolves around his strange outlook of the Web or Internet. That is, the author does not in anyway discuss or even mention varied types of Internet reading. Now, when Internet is real in our lives and not fictional, to a lesser scale, he should have discussed the likelihood of transferring media or some form of learning from the online setting to other place that he considers important. To illustrate this point, I have personally interacted with podcast. Some of the activities I engaged in were things like walking, exercising as well as using the computer. The logic or principle behind Podcast is ancient radio lessons which serve to prove that audio is essential in the learning process.

Carr, Nicholas. I s Google Making Us Stupid? 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, November 25). "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-google-making-us-stupid-by-nicholas-carr/

""Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr." IvyPanda , 25 Nov. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/is-google-making-us-stupid-by-nicholas-carr/.

IvyPanda . (2020) '"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr'. 25 November.

IvyPanda . 2020. ""Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr." November 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-google-making-us-stupid-by-nicholas-carr/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr." November 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-google-making-us-stupid-by-nicholas-carr/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr." November 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-google-making-us-stupid-by-nicholas-carr/.

Google’s Web Browser: Redefining Digital Navigation

This essay about Google’s web browser highlights its user-friendly interface robust security features and seamless cross-platform integration. It emphasizes the browser’s ability to synchronize data across devices offering a personalized and secure online experience. Additionally the browser supports extensive customization through various extensions continuously evolving to meet users’ needs in the digital landscape.

How it works

Browser of Google arrives at to the leading line of digital innovation offering to the users an integral and safe experience consideration. Google LLC develops this browser has accepted separately with his mixture of speed definiteness and central for an user design serving to the various necessities modern users to the internet.

Central to the browser Google is his friendly interface. By submitting the design of supporter of minimalism and intuitional navigation he guarantees that users can easily translate a spider web without distractions.

This simplicity reaches after his time-table disposing lightness of the use on priorities supporting powerful functionality under a hood. Safety becomes the native stones of Google of strategy of browser. With built-in properties like Safe Consideration and regular modifications of safety users protect from threats and attempts of phishing. This prophylactic going near safety increases the trust intended for an user and an obligation strengthens Google before the protection of the data and confidentiality intended for an user.

Wonderful property of browser of Google is her jointless cleating through devices. Synchronizing book-marks looking over history and advantages through platforms through the account of Google users can moving seamless from their workmount to the mobile devices without absence of blow. This synchronization not only increases a comfort but and guarantees successive consideration experience through the different surrounding world.

To that the browser of Google authorises users with the wide array of continuations and adding to the program. These instruments what is influenced give possibility to the users to cut out their experience consideration to satisfy individual advantages and necessities to their requirements. Or increasing the productivity with continuations of management by tasks or improving a review to efficiency from blockers announcement scalene increases browsers the pleasure and obligation intended for an user.

Google prolongs to bring a package over with regular modifications and present improvements. From optimization of performers to the new confidential managements these modifications remove the obligation of Google before the supply of browser that evolves with his necessities of users. Being ahead of technological movements Google guarantees that then his browser becomes the trusted partner for translation of difficulty of modern spider web. In conclusion Google’s web browser sets the standard for digital navigation with its intuitive design robust security features seamless cross-platform integration extensive customization options and continuous innovation. It’s more than a tool for accessing the internet; it’s a gateway to a personalized and secure online experience tailored to the demands of today’s digital landscape.

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What an Essay Is and How to Write One

• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Essays are brief, non-fiction compositions that describe, clarify, argue, or analyze a subject. Students might encounter essay assignments in any school subject and at any level of school, from a personal experience "vacation" essay in middle school to a complex analysis of a scientific process in graduate school. Components of an essay include an introduction , thesis statement , body, and conclusion.

Writing an Introduction

The beginning of an essay can seem daunting. Sometimes, writers can start their essay in the middle or at the end, rather than at the beginning, and work backward. The process depends on each individual and takes practice to figure out what works best for them. Regardless of where students start, it is recommended that the introduction begins with an attention grabber or an example that hooks the reader in within the very first sentence.

The introduction should accomplish a few written sentences that leads the reader into the main point or argument of the essay, also known as a thesis statement. Typically, the thesis statement is the very last sentence of an introduction, but this is not a rule set in stone, despite it wrapping things up nicely. Before moving on from the introduction, readers should have a good idea of what is to follow in the essay, and they should not be confused as to what the essay is about. Finally, the length of an introduction varies and can be anywhere from one to several paragraphs depending on the size of the essay as a whole.

Creating a Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is a sentence that states the main idea of the essay. The function of a thesis statement is to help manage the ideas within the essay. Different from a mere topic, the thesis statement is an argument, option, or judgment that the author of the essay makes about the topic of the essay.

A good thesis statement combines several ideas into just one or two sentences. It also includes the topic of the essay and makes clear what the author's position is in regard to the topic. Typically found at the beginning of a paper, the thesis statement is often placed in the introduction, toward the end of the first paragraph or so.

Developing a thesis statement means deciding on the point of view within the topic, and stating this argument clearly becomes part of the sentence which forms it. Writing a strong thesis statement should summarize the topic and bring clarity to the reader.

For informative essays, an informative thesis should be declared. In an argumentative or narrative essay, a persuasive thesis, or opinion, should be determined. For instance, the difference looks like this:

• Informative Thesis Example:  To create a great essay, the writer must form a solid introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion.
• Persuasive Thesis Example:  Essays surrounded around opinions and arguments are so much more fun than informative essays because they are more dynamic, fluid, and teach you a lot about the author.

Developing Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of an essay include a group of sentences that relate to a specific topic or idea around the main point of the essay. It is important to write and organize two to three full body paragraphs to properly develop it.

Before writing, authors may choose to outline the two to three main arguments that will support their thesis statement. For each of those main ideas, there will be supporting points to drive them home. Elaborating on the ideas and supporting specific points will develop a full body paragraph. A good paragraph describes the main point, is full of meaning, and has crystal clear sentences that avoid universal statements.

Ending an Essay With a Conclusion

A conclusion is an end or finish of an essay. Often, the conclusion includes a judgment or decision that is reached through the reasoning described throughout the essay. The conclusion is an opportunity to wrap up the essay by reviewing the main points discussed that drives home the point or argument stated in the thesis statement.

The conclusion may also include a takeaway for the reader, such as a question or thought to take with them after reading. A good conclusion may also invoke a vivid image, include a quotation, or have a call to action for readers.

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• How to Find the Main Idea
• Examples of Great Introductory Paragraphs
• Complete List of Transition Words
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• Definition and Examples of Body Paragraphs in Composition
• How to Structure an Essay
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• Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay
• Definition and Examples of Analysis in Composition
• How to Write a Solid Thesis Statement
• Unity in Composition
• How to Write a Good Thesis Statement

How to Write an Essay: Step by Step Guide With Examples

An essay is a brief piece of writing that explains, analyzes, and interprets a topic; it’s also a summary of a particular subject in which the author expresses an opinion.

Does the essay need a title? How many paragraphs does an essay have? Does it have headings and a conclusion? Does the essay have a full stop? Are the introduction, body and conclusion on separate pages? How do you make the cover of an essay?

Here, we will address these frequent questions that come up when you need to write an essay.

What is an essay

The difference between an essay and informational text, like what you might find in an encyclopedia, is that an essay is freer, and its parts are not separated by headings.

The format of an essay and most common doubts

The essay does have each of these parts but they are not identified as in a monographic work, but rather they are written one after another. An example of an essay can be seen at the end of this article.

The parts or structure of an essay

Introduction , body of the essay, form and organization the body, conclusion .

Here goes the author’s personal opinion, (You, the person doing the essay, your opinion) an essay has, of course, personal opinions in its body, however, in the conclusion these must be emphatic.

How to write a reference in APA format

Author(s) Last Name, First Initial. Middle Initial. (Year of Publication). Title of Book. Publisher. (Optional: Edition)

Author(s) Last Name, First Initial. Middle Initial. (Year of Publication, Month Day). Title of Webpage. Retrieved from Website URL

Example of an essay

More examples

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Google — Google and Its Workplace

Google and Its Workplace

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Google Gemini: Everything you need to know about the new generative AI platform

Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps and services.

So what’s Google Gemini, exactly? How can you use it? And how does Gemini stack up to the competition ?

To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll keep updated as new Gemini models, features and news about Google’s plans for Gemini are released.

What is Gemini?

Gemini is Google’s long-promised , next-gen generative AI model family, developed by Google’s AI research labs DeepMind and Google Research. It comes in four flavors:

• Gemini Ultra , the most performant Gemini model.
• Gemini Pro , a lightweight alternative to Ultra.
• Gemini Flash , a speedier, “distilled” version of Pro.
• Gemini Nano , two small models — Nano-1 and the more capable Nano-2 — meant to run offline on mobile devices.

All Gemini models were trained to be natively multimodal — in other words, able to work with and analyze more than just text. Google says that they were pre-trained and fine-tuned on a variety of public, proprietary and licensed audio, images and videos, a large set of codebases and text in different languages.

This sets Gemini apart from models such as Google’s own LaMDA , which was trained exclusively on text data. LaMDA can’t understand or generate anything beyond text (e.g., essays, email drafts), but that isn’t necessarily the case with Gemini models.

We’ll note here that the ethics and legality of training models on public data, in some cases without the data owners’ knowledge or consent, are murky indeed. Google has an AI indemnification policy to shield certain Google Cloud customers from lawsuits should they face them, but this policy contains carve-outs. Proceed with caution, particularly if you’re intending on using Gemini commercially.

What’s the difference between the Gemini apps and Gemini models?

Google, proving once again that it lacks a knack for branding , didn’t make it clear from the outset that Gemini is separate and distinct from the Gemini apps on the web and mobile ( formerly Bard ).

The Gemini apps are clients that connect to various Gemini models — Gemini Ultra (with Gemini Advanced, see below) and Gemini Pro so far — and layer chatbot-like interfaces on top. Think of them as front ends for Google’s generative AI, analogous to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude family of apps .

Gemini on the web lives here . On Android, the Gemini app replaces the existing Google Assistant app. And on iOS, the Google and Google Search apps serve as that platform’s Gemini clients.

Gemini apps can accept images as well as voice commands and text — including files like PDFs and soon videos, either uploaded or imported from Google Drive — and generate images. As you’d expect, conversations with Gemini apps on mobile carry over to Gemini on the web and vice versa if you’re signed in to the same Google Account in both places.

Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Chrome, dev tools and more

The Gemini apps aren’t the only means of recruiting Gemini models’ assistance with tasks. Slowly but surely, Gemini-imbued features are making their way into staple Google apps and services like Gmail and Google Docs.

To take advantage of most of these, you’ll need the Google One AI Premium Plan. Technically a part of  Google One , the AI Premium Plan costs $20 and provides access to Gemini in Google Workspace apps like Docs, Slides, Sheets and Meet. It also enables what Google calls Gemini Advanced, which brings Gemini Ultra to the Gemini apps plus support for analyzing and answering questions about uploaded files.

Gemini Advanced users get extras here and there, also, like trip planning in Google Search, which creates custom travel itineraries from prompts. Taking into account things like flight times (from emails in a user’s Gmail inbox), meal preferences and information about local attractions (from Google Search and Maps data), as well as the distances between those attractions, Gemini will generate an itinerary that updates automatically to reflect any changes. 

In Gmail, Gemini lives in a side panel that can write emails and summarize message threads. You’ll find the same panel in Docs, where it helps you write and refine your content and brainstorm new ideas. Gemini in Slides generates slides and custom images. And Gemini in Google Sheets tracks and organizes data, creating tables and formulas.

Gemini’s reach extends to Drive, as well, where it can summarize files and give quick facts about a project. In Meet, meanwhile, Gemini translates captions into additional languages.

Gemini recently came to Google’s Chrome browser in the form of an AI writing tool. You can use it to write something completely new or rewrite existing text; Google says it’ll take into account the webpage you’re on to make recommendations.

Elsewhere, you’ll find hints of Gemini in Google’s database products , cloud security tools , app development platforms (including Firebase and Project IDX ), not to mention apps like Google TV (where Gemini generates descriptions for movies and TV shows), Google Photos (where it handles natural language search queries) and the NotebookLM note-taking assistant .

Code Assist (formerly  Duet AI for Developers ), Google’s suite of AI-powered assistance tools for code completion and generation, is offloading heavy computational lifting to Gemini. So are Google’s security products underpinned by Gemini , like Gemini in Threat Intelligence, which can analyze large portions of potentially malicious code and let users perform natural language searches for ongoing threats or indicators of compromise.

Gemini Gems custom chatbots

Announced at Google I/O 2024, Gemini Advanced users will be able to create Gems , custom chatbots powered by Gemini models, in the future. Gems can be generated from natural language descriptions — for example, “You’re my running coach. Give me a daily running plan” — and shared with others or kept private.

Eventually, Gems will be able to tap an expanded set of integrations with Google services, including Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep and YouTube Music, to complete various tasks.

Gemini Live in-depth voice chats

A new experience called Gemini Live , exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers, will arrive soon on the Gemini apps on mobile, letting users have “in-depth” voice chats with Gemini.

With Gemini Live enabled, users will be able to interrupt Gemini while the chatbot’s speaking to ask clarifying questions, and it’ll adapt to their speech patterns in real time. And Gemini will be able to see and respond to users’ surroundings, either via photos or video captured by their smartphones’ cameras.

Live is also designed to serve as a virtual coach of sorts, helping users rehearse for events, brainstorm ideas and so on. For instance, Live can suggest which skills to highlight in an upcoming job or internship interview, and it can give public speaking advice.

What can the Gemini models do?

Because Gemini models are multimodal, they can perform a range of multimodal tasks, from transcribing speech to captioning images and videos in real time. Many of these capabilities have reached the product stage (as alluded to in the previous section), and Google is promising much more in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, it’s a bit hard to take the company at its word.

Google seriously underdelivered with the original Bard launch. More recently, it ruffled feathers with a video purporting to show Gemini’s capabilities that was more or less aspirational, not live, and with an image generation feature that turned out to be offensively inaccurate .

Also, Google offers no fix for some of the underlying problems with generative AI tech today, like its encoded biases and tendency to make things up (i.e. hallucinate ). Neither do its rivals, but it’s something to keep in mind when considering using or paying for Gemini.

Google’s best Gemini demo was faked

Assuming for the purposes of this article that Google is being truthful with its recent claims, here’s what the different tiers of Gemini can do now and what they’ll be able to do once they reach their full potential:

What you can do with Gemini Ultra

Google says that Gemini Ultra — thanks to its multimodality — can be used to help with things like physics homework, solving problems step-by-step on a worksheet and pointing out possible mistakes in already filled-in answers.

Ultra can also be applied to tasks such as identifying scientific papers relevant to a problem, Google says. The model could extract information from several papers, for instance, and update a chart from one by generating the formulas necessary to re-create the chart with more timely data.

Gemini Ultra technically supports image generation. But that capability hasn’t made its way into the productized version of the model yet — perhaps because the mechanism is more complex than how apps such as ChatGPT generate images. Rather than feed prompts to an image generator (like DALL-E 3 , in ChatGPT’s case), Gemini outputs images “natively,” without an intermediary step.

Ultra is available as an API through Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI dev platform, and AI Studio, Google’s web-based tool for app and platform developers. It also powers Google’s Gemini apps, but not for free. Once again, access to Ultra through any Gemini app requires subscribing to the AI Premium Plan.

Gemini Pro’s capabilities

Google says that Gemini Pro is an improvement over LaMDA in its reasoning, planning and understanding capabilities. The latest version, Gemini 1.5 Pro , exceeds even Ultra’s performance in some areas, Google claims.

Gemini 1.5 Pro is improved in a number of areas compared with its predecessor, Gemini 1.0 Pro, perhaps most obviously in the amount of data that it can process. Gemini 1.5 Pro can take in up to 1.4 million words, two hours of video or 22 hours of audio, and reason across or answer questions about all that data.

1.5 Pro became generally available on Vertex AI and AI Studio in June alongside a feature called code execution, which aims to reduce bugs in code that the model generates by iteratively refining that code over several steps. (Code execution also supports Gemini Flash.)

Within Vertex AI, developers can customize Gemini Pro to specific contexts and use cases via a fine-tuning or “grounding” process. For example, Pro (along with other Gemini models) can be instructed to use data from third-party providers like Moody’s, Thomson Reuters, ZoomInfo and MSCI, or source information from corporate data sets or Google Search instead of its wider knowledge bank. Gemini Pro can also be connected to external, third-party APIs to perform particular actions, like automating a workflow.

Google brings Gemini Pro to Vertex AI

AI Studio offers templates for creating structured chat prompts with Pro. Developers can control the model’s creative range and provide examples to give tone and style instructions — and also tune Pro’s safety settings.

Vertex AI Agent Builder lets people build Gemini-powered “agents” within Vertex AI. For example, a company could create an agent that analyzes previous marketing campaigns to understand a brand style, and then apply that knowledge to help generate new ideas consistent with the style. 

Gemini Flash is for less demanding work

For less demanding applications, there’s Gemini Flash. The newest version is 1.5 Flash.

An offshoot of Gemini Pro that’s small and efficient, built for narrow, high-frequency generative AI workloads, Flash is multimodal like Gemini Pro, meaning it can analyze audio, video and images as well as text (but only generate text).

Flash is particularly well-suited for tasks such as summarization, chat apps, image and video captioning and data extraction from long documents and tables, Google says. It’ll be generally available via Vertex AI and AI Studio by mid-July.

Devs using Flash and Pro can optionally leverage context caching, which lets them store large amounts of information (say, a knowledge base or database of research papers) in a cache that Gemini models can quickly and relatively cheaply access. Context caching is an additional fee on top of other Gemini model usage fees, however.

Gemini Nano can run on your phone

Gemini Nano is a much smaller version of the Gemini Pro and Ultra models, and it’s efficient enough to run directly on (some) phones instead of sending the task to a server somewhere. So far, Nano powers a couple of features on the Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24 , including Summarize in Recorder and Smart Reply in Gboard.

The Recorder app, which lets users push a button to record and transcribe audio, includes a Gemini-powered summary of recorded conversations, interviews, presentations and other audio snippets. Users get summaries even if they don’t have a signal or Wi-Fi connection — and in a nod to privacy, no data leaves their phone in the process.

Nano is also in Gboard, Google’s keyboard replacement. There, it powers a feature called Smart Reply, which helps to suggest the next thing you’ll want to say when having a conversation in a messaging app. The feature initially only works with WhatsApp but will come to more apps over time, Google says.

In the Google Messages app on supported devices, Nano drives Magic Compose, which can craft messages in styles like “excited,” “formal” and “lyrical.”

Google says that a future version of Android will tap Nano to alert users to potential scams during calls. And soon, TalkBack, Google’s accessibility service, will employ Nano to create aural descriptions of objects for low-vision and blind users.

Is Gemini better than OpenAI’s GPT-4?

Google has several times  touted  Gemini’s superiority on benchmarks, claiming that Gemini Ultra exceeds current state-of-the-art results on “30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model research and development.” But leaving aside the question of whether benchmarks really indicate a better model , the scores Google points to appear to be only marginally better than OpenAI’s GPT-4 models.

OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-4o , pulls ahead of 1.5 Pro pretty substantially on text evaluation, visual understanding and audio translation performance, meanwhile. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet beats them both — but perhaps not for long, given the AI industry’s breakneck pace.

How much do the Gemini models cost?

Gemini 1.0 Pro (the first version of Gemini Pro), 1.5 Pro and Flash are available through Google’s Gemini API for building apps and services, all with free options. But the free options impose usage limits and leave out some features, like context caching.

Otherwise, Gemini models are pay-as-you-go. Here’s the base pricing (not including add-ons like context caching) as of June 2024:

• Gemini 1.0 Pro: 50 cents per 1 million input tokens, $1.50 per 1 million output tokens
• Gemini 1.5 Pro: $3.05 per 1 million tokens input (for prompts up to 128,000 tokens) or $7 per 1 million tokens (for prompts longer than 128,000 tokens); $10.50 per 1 million tokens (for prompts up to 128,000 tokens) or $21.00 per 1 million tokens (for prompts longer than 128,000)
• Gemini 1.5 Flash: 35 cents per 1 million tokens (for prompts up to 128K tokens), 70 cents per 1 million tokens (for prompts longer than 128K); $1.05 per 1 million tokens (for prompts up to 128K tokens), $2.10 per 1 million tokens (for prompts longer than 128K)

Tokens are subdivided bits of raw data, like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”; 1 million tokens is equivalent to about 700,000 words. “Input” refers to tokens fed into the model, while “output” refers to tokens that the model generates.

Ultra pricing has yet to be announced, and Nano is still in early access .

Is Gemini coming to the iPhone?

It might!  Apple and Google are reportedly in talks to put Gemini to use  for a number of features to be included in an upcoming iOS update later this year. Nothing’s definitive, as Apple is also said to be in talks with OpenAI and  has been working on developing its own generative AI capabilities .

Following a keynote presentation at WWDC 2024, Apple SVP Craig Federighi confirmed plans to work with additional third-party models including Gemini, but didn’t divulge additional details.

This post was originally published Feb. 16, 2024 and has since been updated to include new information about Gemini and Google’s plans for it.

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