Search Overload!

As I am trying to think of a topic to write for this blog post, I realized something. There are so many articles, so many ideas, so many opinions that I can find if I just enter a specific word into Google. This may sound easy but the amount of information on the Internet today is extremely overwhelming. Are we reaching the point where it is too large to be effectively searched? I just entered “dog” into Google, and 1,820,000,000 results came up- this is too much information to even manage, and when there is too much information it is very difficult for a person to understand an issue and make decisions. Even if I look for a specific dog, these narrow and more specific categories are overloaded as well. It’s comparable to when you go to a super market and see 17 different types of jelly. Which one do you choose? Why is it so complicated? Because there is just too much to choose from! This is why I do not like to write research papers, because I already dread all the information I have to go through to find what is perfect, and it’s very time-consuming in my opinion. By simply searching for a word or phrase we come across so many pages and suggestions that are completely irrelevant to what we had been searching for originally. I thought of the Bing commercials:

I think these commercials are pretty funny because they show what information overload has done to us all.

Information overload can also be seen in our e-mail inboxes. We receive so many e-mails every single day, just from being on a particular website, or because we ordered something from that site. As we discussed in class, even at Drew we are bombarded with useless information that people send out to the entire campus. Sometimes my inbox is 78% full and I just do not feel like going through every single one of them, opening e-mails, seeing what’s important and what’s not. It’s just too much!

I love the internet, what would I do without it? But sometimes I feel lost in this big world of information that is accessible to me.