Google- Far from a Church

Meagan Cox

A lot of what Carr mentioned about Google in chapter eight came as a surprise to me. It is quite obvious that Google’s founders are successful in their business, and maybe I just do not think about technology as much as many people (such as Carr) do, but I did not think about, nor did I ever realize how much the founders and workers at Google invest into their company. Carr seems to put Google on an extremely, exaggeratedly high pedestal, on which, in my opinion it really does not belong. With that being said, the people at Google did deserve some recognition in Carr’s book, for they did invent something that changed the internet. In my opinion, however, the power of Google is not that it controls our minds as Carr states, but rather, that it controls a lot of how different websites on the internet work.

                I probably use Google at least once a day, on average. However, that does not mean that I would fall apart without it. To compare Google to a church, as Carr does in chapter eight, is a far stretch from reality. Although Google has helped me out a lot, I definitely could live without it, for there are plenty of other sites, like the Yahoo search bar, that do just as good of a job for me. Carr makes it seem as though Google is successful because no one can seem to do what Google does, however, this does not prove to be true to me. When I think of search engines, Google is probably the first one that comes to mind, but that is not because, as Carr states, they run their site in a way no one else does, but rather, they market their site in a way no one else does. Google is essentially popular for being known, and although there are plenty of other sites out there that do essentially the same thing as Google, they do not present themselves in the way that Google does, and that is what makes the site stand out from its competition.

                Never would I have imagined that people were hired by Google to watch my every move on the site, see where I click (or don’t click), see what I respond to the most, or time how long I spend on the site. However, as Carr brings up, there are people that do just that, and that is probably why Google has prospered so much- they invest so much. With all of the money, time and energy spent on developing every aspect of Google, I would hope that it would be as popular as it is. The site makes it so that users are attracted to it, and though their ideas, like that of AdWords are extremely good ideas, they are not impossible to copy. Because of this, many sites are able to do exactly what Google has done, making them no better, or worse of a search engine. However, because Google was the first site to put the ideas into action, it is obviously going to be a more popular site.