Google is mighty, everybody says so. Like, nobody needs a library for anything. Like, my flight was delayed and the airline’s app was informative but needed 68 clicks so I googled the airline and the flight number, and Google not only told me first click straightup what the current delay was but also the expected departure gate and reason for delay. I might be remembering that last wrongly but you get the idea: every piece of information on God’s earth is on Google. Google is omniscient (nice word: “omni” + the “sci” is Latin “scio,” knowing, as in “scientific.”)
So when a friend and I were talking about another friend’s illness, naturally we googled it. My goodness but we learned things: the illness is caused by a microbe, a bug, which gets into you by various means and then sets up shop in one of various organs — lungs, eyes, brain, muscles. It can be knocked out with various antibiotics. But once the bug gets in, it stays there; so active infections can recur. The bug tends to reactivate when the immune system goes haywire.
Interesting as all this is, it wasn’t what we wanted to know. We wanted to know about our friend, not facts from some bug fan club. Our friend’s infection had been reactivated in the same organ that was originally infected; and we wanted to know whether the infection could move to a different organ, in particular, could it move to the brain because the brain is, you know, important. Our friend is otherwise entirely healthy and robust and full of beans; so we wanted to know whether the infection could reactivate even with a fully-working immune system. These questions were not arcane, not hyper-specific; they’re questions anyone would ask. We googled and googled until our fingers were sore.
We googled the popular and more or less respectable medical websites. We googled .gov sites, like the CDC and the NIH. We googled academic research papers. Not one of them came anywhere near answering our questions. I’m a science writer, I FIND THINGS, and I couldn’t find this.
After I thought about this a bit, I realized I’d solved this problem before, maybe a million times before. On Google, I hadn’t been reading every word of every sentence, I’d been skimming for subjects – reactivation in different organs, reactivation with intact immune system – that turned out not to be there. But the answers could have been lurking under similar subjects, could have sneaked in under another heading as one fast, slightly unrelated sentence. The alternative, not skimming, is a non-starter: in the first place, it never works and you end up in small dark places with a head full of dancing dust bunnies; and in the second place, life is already short.
So the experienced, sensible, sane science writer stops reading stuff on the internet, finds an expert, and asks for the answers. This always works. This never not-works — not even when the questions turn out to be slightly wrong, because the expert knows the right question. So for instance, maybe my friend and I were asking whether the bug could first infect one organ and then travel to another, when the right question was, could the bug set up the first infection in two organs at once and reactivate in the second one only later?
Anyway. Finding experts doesn’t take any special expertise: you ask successive experts who the real expert is. Everybody has doctors who can recommend, say, neurologists who can give you names of the bug experts. At present my friend and I still have the questions but the answers are going to happen, they’re only a matter of time.
And if the question isn’t medical and you can’t successively approximate an expert? Recall from your youth or your parents’ youth the people who knew how to find answers, and do what centuries of seekers of information across the globe have done: get your good self to a library and ask a librarian.
Librarians (probably) also successively approximate, they find the reference books that refer to more specialized books and so on to the answer. Librarians have mental hierarchies of answer-finding architectures, catalogued and networked in their librarian brains. Librarians are Google search codes you can talk back to, who can talk back to you, with whom you can refine the question, and the answer will happen, it’s only a matter of time.
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photo of the Old Library at Dublin’s Trinity College by Diliff , via Wikimedia
This is fantastic- finally, someone is talking about this! Thank you for this piece, I find it fascinating. Oh- you USED to be able to find things online, & Google in 2002 was completely a different animal than it is now. I recall everyone complaining when Google “changed it’s algorithm, now I can’t find anything on it!” do you remember that? And everything is behind a paywall: “To read this article, you may join now at our yearly rate or buy article for $35.00”.
Research pathology, or look up a disease? Ha! WebMD, all of those listings give the same, vague non-descript symptoms for every illness listed :Headache Fatigue lack of appetite General malaise. They fail to list some very specific things, oh those are secret- only super special highly paid (or volunteer) researchers who work for WHO or the UN who can sign in with credentials or special sign in codes have access apparently. Pathology is the most elusive, confounding thing to look up online there is- oh, that and data that can be used politically. It’s a conspiracy! It’s like, they want us all ignorant and uninformed- so we have to go pay someone else to give us the information. It’s as if there are two worlds: one for us, and one for Them.
Get thee to a library- and woe, I find our library has literally discarded Every Single Published Item pre-1983. They said something about possible lead in the ink- I asked them how many children ate library books and got lead poisoning? Do you even know how much printed material of that “possible” (not factual – key word possible here) leaded ink you’d have to consume to get it? World’s gone mad.
Try archive.org, and mind you even they have changed their search algorithms as well- their system even seems to be confused & comes up empty if the wrong letter case is used, which I find ludicrous, don’t you? but it’s better than general searching using.. ulghh.. “Google”.