Thursday, May 31, 2012

remember that time?

do you guys remember when yahoo was a legitimate search engine? and people used to ask jeeves everything before they killed him off to seem more professional or something? and there was an e one. excite? anyway, i remember having research projects and the teachers telling us to use all four of the search engines (redundancy is underrated i guess), and then one day, but it was nothing as sudden and noticeable as that, google just kind of took over everything. and suddenly you're not "looking things up online" you're "googling it." and all the other search engines crawled into the dark corners with their tails between their legs and just let it happen. (i guess backbones are overrated.)

i also remember a project i did in seventh grade. part of it was looking up things that happened (o)in the year, month, and day we were born. it was the first big school project where we were required to use internet sources instead of just books. (remember those days? now they have to force us to use books in research projects and even then i usually lie about it.) anyway, the teacher kept telling me that i was searching wrong because i had too many words in my queries. apparently i was being too specific or something? (i typed 'earthquakes in april 1988' and she went crazy.) now we type entire sentences into google. i've searched for entire paragraphs. i've put so many words into my search bar that google had to cut me off and tell me to shut up halfway through my request. (every time i do though i feel my seventh grade english teacher glaring at me.)

anyway, i really don't know where i was going with this or what even brought it to mind. but yeah. there it is. google. and searching. and... stuff. here's a quote i like to make up for my lack of a point (it's secretly one of my biggest fears. (the quote. not not having a point. i got over that one ages ago)):

“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.” ~Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

i think i abused my right to use parentheses in this post.

*Stutter - Umbridge (A Very Potter Sequel)

8 comments:

  1. anonymous hippopotamusMay 31, 2012 at 9:58 PM

    did you have mrs o'leary? i dont remember her being that way. :/

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  2. yeah i did and usually she wasn't. i think she just got frustrated with me because i refused to do it her way. it made absolutely no sense to me not to be as specific as possible, though.

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  3. Haha, I have this foolproof method of using wikipedia for everything when it's specifically forbidden: just copy paste the citations on the bottom of each wikipedia page you use.

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  4. lol it's like a pre-researched research paper. sometimes i use wikipedia just to get sources to use from their citations.

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  5. I use wiki the same way. We are told to use books and journals... so I go to google books and google scholar and if something looks good at the first sentence/abstract, I use it as a reference :p

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  6. lol i do the abstract thing too. i wonder if anyone from our generation actually researches "the right way." or if the "right way" is too outdated to expect us to use these days anyway.

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  7. Well.... most people on my course don't even seem able to use google... they have to read loads of books and journals in the library and can't find anything online.... maybe we're stepping back in time

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  8. hmm that's interesting. it's probably because i've been surrounded by computer nerds for the past five years, but i didn't think people like that still existed.

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