That’s right!! THIS IS IT!! ABOUT GOOGLE!!
Pretty cliché isn’t it? But as generic as it may look I’m sure this piqued your interest enough to start reading, after all you’re already here, right? Now into the fray of today’s appreciation, let’s get started with a small approach question:
Hard to answer, right? Now let’s go further and think how many times has the rest of the world googled today, you’d need a lot of fingers to count that, because a simple google search (this is gonna be really redundant here) states that our best and most used search engine processes roughly 3.5 billion searches per day, that’s about half the world population, try to imagine how much coffee would google be drinking if it was a person, it would remind you of a certain someone who became an orange and red flash after downing 100 cups and that would be just the beginning, but to clear any skeptical thoughts you might have because in this time and age we’re prompted to second guess any data we are given so easily, here’s a real time statistic of how many times is google used per day, and yeah I know the number might be even greater than 3.5b, we always surpass our own expectations don’t we?
https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
And to bring some more insight to the table, let’s show some more facts about the search engine with the most creative headers before we talk about how it has impacted our lives.
1: Google is the most visited webpage worldwide, that’s right, I used our dear search engine only to find out that on top of being the most used search engine, it’s the most visited page in the world with about 92 billion visits per month, that’s a lot of popularity, and a lot of it comes just from google being our default webpage whenever we open our browser and then type whatever just popped in our heads, just like that, and right now I can bet your next line will be “I will go and google this just to be sure”! Go ahead, proving my point just makes this reading waaaaaay truer, and more fun to keep having while at it.
2: About 60% of google searches are done on mobile devices, that is not as surprising considering the massive trend mobile devices have become (I’m looking at you South Korea), and even better, some of the people reading this MIGHT BE DOING IT ON THEIR PHONES! Self-proving facts people! Google just brought a lot of them and each second they become even harder to refute, and let’s be real we don’t want to refute this because it’s so comfortable to know, comfort breeds weakness but god we love this kind of weakness and we sure as daylight going to let it be our undoing, no regrets there, at all.
3: We use google on an average of 3 to 5 times per day, that might not sound so impressive since the regular user, despite using his phone/pc/tablet at least 8 hours a day, spends its time on a myriad of activities, now if they’re online workers (like me and probably you too) you can bet their searches amount to at least 10 to 20 times a day, this goes for artists, community managers, the whole and vast world of freelancers. Now if we go to a bigger version of this fact, google processes at least 40k searches per second, another general fact states that the second most searched webpage on google is Facebook, followed by Youtube, so you can see how big of a deal social media has become along with our search engine, mind blowing and yet not as impressive, a bittersweet contradiction we love to realize.
4: Google possesses a 1:8 profit ratio only with Google Ads, I’m sure this really blew up your mind, but yes, for every $1 spent on google ads, the revenue obtained amounts to $8, but don’t think just anyone does it, this is mostly to big businesses, the ones with higher budgets and organized managements, also counts for entrepreneurs trying to have their product or service reach out to most people, but being real here, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who’ve also learned how to make the most out of a small ad campaign on google, after all people never cease to amaze me and I’m sure I will be amazed even further by this at some point, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, who knows.
Now that we talked about some fun facts, let’s get to the real deal of this reading, the main reason why this was made and why you checked this out.
LET’S GO!
First, back in the early days of the internet, when dial-up connections were still a thing butting heads with the rising broadband connections, the glorious 90s, google, in its baby moments was established like many big companies on their humble beginnings, as a garage company, one that at the moment we didn’t know would get this insane reach to the whole world.
Remember this? Truly nostalgic, what a thing to remember.
From being an associate with Yahoo to the biggest search engine in the world in a few decades, today we can find pretty much ANYTHING just by typing one word, a small phrase, a sentence, even a whole paragraph on google, ask yourself the question: How many things have I learned just by googling them? I’m pretty sure there’s so many things you’re probably not even keeping count, and that’s the greatest part of this, with google we have learned things that range from a fried chicken recipe to how does quantum computing work. This never ending self-learning experience keeps going even as we speak for so much people on so many things, and then it gets complemented by the opinion of so many other users that coincidentally looked up for the same thing you did, how many times have you searched a “how to” guide on things such as cleaning a room properly or getting a window unstuck? How many times have you found a technical problem and solved it by being guided by other users who solved the same issue?
A lot of people keeps on rambling about how “millennials” do not have proper DIY skills, but far from reality, our generation and the ones that will succeed us actually work around this issue simply by –exactly! You know it!- googling it! Surely most of us have seen videos about how millennials can’t solve a simple issue like opening a paint can or using a potato cutter, but as ridiculous as this deficiencies can be, most of them solved it by googling it and then looking up a short video on Youtube, I too have done this countless times, heck I even remember this one time I looked up how to do a necktie, I’m pretty sure I can look that up again right now and I will even find a catalog of how many knots can a simple necktie have, and that would be just a small part of it all. This doesn’t stop just on small “how to” searches, we as students have taken and given a lot of general knowledge to the academic field, not in the way of papers and thesis, but as reference, as workaround for problems we couldn’t understand at first, thinking out of the box was never so overused than the times when students from all over the world started googling and discussing their problems online, and this is said in the best possible way because as far as it goes, students are still finding new solutions to their learning issues, and even more with the times we’re going through, homeschooling has a fun side no one tells the kids about when you start googling for something you didn’t understand on that Zoom class, just let them run free and the results will surprise you all.
And the list goes on and on, you saw your neighbor doing some new method of gardening? Probably googled it. Your coworker has been dealing with a coding issue and solved it after an hour? Probably googled it (ahem STACKOVERFLOW), your sibling learned how to solder a circuit overnight? YES, THEY PROBABLY GOOGLED IT! We can talk about this all day long and we’ll never run out of how many things we have all learned by simply googling it, and this not only covers practical knowledge, let’s talk about how a google search has helped us become better people, seeking advice from others who have greater life experience, looking for guides left by the ones who are not here anymore, checking forums about something that we don’t know how to deal with, that’s right, all of these things are also brought to us by a simple google search, so much knowledge and so much personal relief, growth and realization just by typing a few words on a bar.
And we’re gonna keep it up, let’s direct the topic to US, how many of us hop, skip and jump from one website to another looking for new sources of income? How many pages are there helping people feed their families, pay for medicines and even their rent? How many of us read articles like this one you’re in right now and find a way to support themselves after being slumped for who knows how long? Every day we find a new way to be a better version of ourselves, we make some progress on something we don’t even know about, we learn something we never thought we would, and in today’s age and time part of the credit goes to google, that one answer that helped you finally get your degree probably came from a fine print on a paragraph you found googling, that one picture that showed you step by step how your project could be assembled probably also came by from a google search, many more things we can’t even remember have made us into the great people we are today and I am sure about half of them came –repeat with me- from a google search!
And let’s be clear about something, it’s not google who made us who we are, it is actually THANKS TO GOOGLE who helped us along the path to becoming who we are, the endless online advice can only do so much for us, but it is us who receive that knowledge and decide what to do with it and where to lead ourselves to, it’s all that positive insight and feedback what offers some guidance along with the people we relate to on a daily basis and what contributes to our better lifestyle, I say this so no one can ever berate your way of learning the things you already did, nobody has any right to invalidate the quality of your knowledge for obtaining it through a screen, neither can anyone say that a computer made you who you are, none of that is true, never has been and will never be, it is in fact the rest of the people who offer their knowledge, their experience, their time and resources to us through a computer so we can offer the same back to others after us, that is a cycle that at least I am willing to keep going and that I hope everyone who suffered and learned and now knows better also does, that’s what makes people human beyond just a biological condition, the desire to learn, and to teach.
Now that we are done with the delightful fact check, the motivating reminiscence of how many things have you learned in your life not just from books, the short but effective moment of motivation to keep this learning going on, and last but not least important, the many reasons why we should we be thankful for all this knowledge, I hope you keep finding new things to learn from every day and that they result as useful as every other you’ve already learned.
With all this, I happily say, until next time.
Google searches used for reference in this article: 29
Google rocks!!