It’s almost embarrassing to think of how much the average internet dwelling human uses Google every day. If somebody added up all the time we’ve spent curiously, or annoyedly, or frantically tapping phrases into the search bar, we’d probably be in for a surprise about just how much time we’ve spent sating our need for random bits of information. The fact that the world’s most recognizable search engine is mere seconds away from answering our queries has changed the way that we think forever. Only a generation ago, if we had a burning question we would have to ask a friend, search it up in the library, or simply learn to accept that we might never know the answer unless we happened to stumble upon it. Nowadays, we’re programmed to demand that the online gods provide us with all knowledge in seconds, and it had better take two pages or less.
If you’re a more nosy or neurotic kind of person, this can make things even worse. It’s likely that every hour of the day, you can be found scrabbling for the search bar, ready to type out long lists of symptoms for a WebMD diagnosis or pondering things like «[random conspiracy theory] reddit».
For sure, our reliance on having all this at our fingertips is one of the best and worst things to have happened to us in the modern age. We’re more powerful than ever, but also lazier. Not only this, but despite the billions of searches that happen on Google every day, there are even things out there that remain entirely unGoogled.
It’s hard to imagine that our desire to know has those kinds of boundaries. However, when you put your mind to it, there’s probably quite a lot of things that nobody has had much desire to find out more about. This has been underlined in a thread by @engineers_feed, which asked people about all the things they believed had never passed through the mythical portal that many of us base most of our learning around. As might be expected, some of the answers were pretty wacky. When you don’t have the internet for inspiration, your thoughts can become even weirder.
