How shall we put it?

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Sometimes we know exactly what it is we're looking for. If we're searching for a particular song, for instance, one phrase that we're sure of is almost always enough to find all the words, or in that way, the name of the song and who sings it. Things can be a bit more difficult if we're looking for a concept, but when a phrase like "six degrees of separation" brings up almost 30,000 pages, we know we're on the right track.

But although it's clear that there are lots of testimonials out there, it's not fully obvious what the right phrases to search for are. A search for "google saved my life" brings up only a handful of hits, while "internet saved my life" brings up 95, but most of these relate to social aspects of the internet rather than to searching.

There are, of course, other possibilities. "Searching as a way of life", for instance, brings up a few hits, some of which are very enlightening, but these don't necessarily refer to internet searches. "Search as a way of life" seemed to me a promising term, but it only brought me something that seemed totally off the wall. When we go a bit further out on a limb, however, we start having a bit more luck. The idea that "Google is God" would bring up over 400 hits might at first seem rather strange, until we learn (or remember) that in July of 2003 the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an article titled Opinion: Is Google God? which generated quite a bit of discussion. Of course not all of these focus on searching as a central activity in our lives, but at least some of them do.

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Go to: The internet saved my life, or
Go to: I search, therefore I am?