A Google a Day
These days, you can not have Pub Quizes with at least a few teams cheating by using a phone to Google the answers. Knowing trivia of the top of your head seems to have become as useful a skill as calligraphy.<p>A friend of mine was about to fall for a hoax/scam. And even though they changed the words and meaning of quite a few elements, I was able to pinpoint the exact scam using carefully crafted Google queries.<p>With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. Someone would tell a strong story in the 90s during a birthday, and you'd have to go to library the next day to verify or discard it. Not anymore.<p>Someone asked why those old modems made noise, and instead of giving an answer right away, it took all of 15 seconds to find the answer online, much better than I ever could answer it.<p>I remember my first job skill test. It was multiple choice and you were allowed to use the internet. I answered all questions by Googling keywords from the question, in combination with keywords from each answer, and looking which combination gave the most results. Answering this way I got a near perfect score. There were questions about programming languages I hadn't even written a "Hello World"-example for.<p>With all this goodness, comes of course the danger of relying on Google for all your answers. If it is not on the first page of the results it is not true. Especially younger people believe a lot of facts they find online. Another danger is using Google for confirming a bias: With so many pages online, there is bound to be a page in the results that agrees with your initial hunch, however incorrect it is.<p>I participated in the pilot for Google Answers. There were people there that, if the answer was to be found anywhere online, could answer it, no matter their expertise on the subject. Googling well is a valuable skill.