I recently heard a radio show talking about an experiment they did with kids, something about find a certain presidents birthday and something else about him….. The overwhelming majority of the kids failed as after looking at a couple pages of google results they came to the conlclusion the information did not exist and gave up. Sad for sure. I am sure the next thing on their minds was "whats next?" I think we have entered into an age where we do not know exactly what affects the current technology will have on us and our future. I think, and this is only my opinion, that imagination has (is going) gone out the windonw in exchange for millions of methods and sources of visual, and experiential stimulation. What this is doing for the future of science and technology is scarry. Just my thoughts.

I say this based partly on my own personal experience with programers, designers and social entrpeneurs. When faced with a problem how many people say "how doe we solve this" and how many people say "lets look up the solution on Google"…. While we are teaching increasingly high levels of computer "classes" that is I mean more classed, not more in depth classes, we are not teaching our kids to think, to understand and to be inventive…

The solutions to many of the problems I come up against while programming are not easy find, even with the 'search engine' that is dumb enough to serve up links pitching the sale of hemorrhoids (yes, it wasn't that long ago that typing that word into Google's search box would result in all manner of sponsored links with titles like "buy hemorrhoids online", "best prices on hemorrhoids", etc.). More recently I think they've fixed that, but it was great for a good laugh while it lasted.

I often find myself stymied by the results of Google searches, and think that's mostly a result of what we might call 'Google scraping' (although some might liken it to bottom-feeding), which are the seemingly countless number of 'content replicators' that do little other than replicate the content of resources like public newsgroups and so on, and merely redisplay that content along with lots of advertising.

The web sites that do that exist solely to get their advertising in front of Goggle users, and collectively make Google far less ueseful than it might otherwise be.

Probably not. As in your case, you used knowledge/technology existing at that time and built upon it. If you had to sit and create each and every component that you found from scratch instead of picking of off the shelf, you may not have reached far. Similarly, the information on the web helps prevent the need of reinventing the wheel. But I don't think that makes us any less inquisitive about what we can do with that information.

If anything, the web has changed the way we solve problems. Previously we had to solve them ourselves. Now we do with along with others. I constantly use Google to find me bits of code. But that does not stop me from creating a new algorithm when I cannot find what I was looking for or am not happy with what I have found.

You make some good points about the importance of "the struggle and adventure of discovery" (and I agree with you there), but what I'm hoping is that Google will expand the boundaries of what we know, so that new discoveries are of things that are outside the boundaries of what is commonly "known". You shouldn't have to struggle to relearn what everyone else knows.