INTERNET SEARCH IS BETTER THAN EVER IF YOU KNOW HOW TO USE IT

IN FEBRUARY, THE software engineer and blogger Dmitri Brereton wrote an essay titled “Google Search Is Dying” for his personal website.

- MIKE RIGGS

His two main arguments are that Google’s advertising is messy and dominates the results page, while the actual search results are mostly junk sites that have been reverse-engineered to rank highly.

If you have never searched for something on Google and felt deeply dissatisfied by what it showed you, Brereton essentially argues, you are living in the Matrix. “What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search,” he writes. “You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.”

I was living in the Matrix. Then, two days into my 5-month-old’s ear infection, I got search-pilled.

We had taken him to a doctor, but no one told us what we should do ifour baby’s ears hurt so badly that he wouldn’t eat. When we called the pediatrician’s office following a daylong hunger strike, the nurse told us that if we couldn’t get him to feed, he’d have to go to the emergency room.

Naturally, we turned to Google for a second opinion.