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Aedge Podcast - Rarely Rational - Google Effect

Apr 23, 2024

This is the second episode in the cognitive bias series affecting memory and recall. Jyothi Sridhar, Madhavi Nadig and Anagha talk about the Google effect and wonder what life would be like without the internet and digital devices to help us remember and recall information.

Who is up for a digital detox? Looking forward to spending a day without phones and internet? Make sure you are well prepared with handy information that usually is offloaded onto a digital device.
The Google effect is the tendency to forget information that is readily available to look up.
Are you dependent on auto-correct for spellings?
Speed reading relies on the Google effect. Skimming through words on a page is common because you know you can go back to it whenever you want to look up more information.
People tend to remember where to find relevant information or how to look it up, but not the actual data.
On the positive side of this bias, digital devices have enabled us to dedicate more time to creative work by offloading mundane information that need not be memorised by us anymore.
While there are positives to relying on the Internet as our second brain, not remembering important information in a dire situation might backfire.
Shortening attention spans and chasing down rabbit holes of information during a Google search, forgetting the task that you set out for initially is a negative side of this bias.
Due to limited time, you view only the top search results. And those may be based on those who had the deepest pockets to boost their page or those with the best SEO tactics.
Filter bubbles - a tactic used in displaying search results to a user based on their ideologies, creating echo chambers.
Recognition over recall is one of the usability heuristics recommended in interaction design.
Search Engines - Confidence Boosters or Distractors?
Auto suggestions on IDEs are a positive of Google effect.
There are different memory techniques to improve recall of information to reduce dependency on devices or the internet and overcome this bias. - Google now is an official verb in the Oxford English dictionary.
An ‘antegooglewhackblatt’ is a search query for a single word that returns zero results.
Have you ever heard of what a googlewhack is?

This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.

Write to us at podcasts@adepticlabs.com.