Build Your Own Google

You Google too much. So stop.

It’s too easy to find info these days. Why remember the phone number for your favorite restaurant — or even take the two seconds to save it to your contacts — when you could just Google it again next time?

We’re so reliant on Google that it’s hard to imagine an internet without it. Non-techies are apt to sit down at a computer, type “Google” into the search bar on your browser, select the first link, and then search for what they’re looking for — even if said site is something that’d be easy to remember like the New York Times or the MLB.

And it’s not just about Google itself — google’s just an easy short-hand for search engine, one that’s an official English verb these days. So whether you Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Google, if you’re like me you likely do it far too much.

Search engine’s effect on our brains has been debated for quite some time, with Nicholas Carr asking in The Atlantic “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” half a decade ago, and the UCLA and CNN countering several months later that “Google does a brain good”. In reality, it’s hard to say it’s a good or a bad — we’re so reliant on search engines, we wouldn’t know how to function without them. Why would you remember basic facts when you could just look them up later? It’s the same rationale most of us made in school when we decided our teachers were crazy for having us memorize obscure names and dates, and it’s the same rationale we make each time we Google for something we’ve already looked up before.

We’ve outsourced our brains, without the slightest qualm.

I just argued in this issue’s first article that you should stop remembering where your files are saved on your computer, and search for them instead. Indeed, I think you should. Your computer’s smart, and you should let it do the heavy lifting for you and save your cognitive skills for more important tasks. But searching for the same fact on Google a dozen times isn’t smart.

So what should you do instead? Build your own Google.

Geeks reading this, don’t go fire up a server and start crawling the entire internet. Bad idea. Unless you’re Gabriel Weinberg, in which case, keep up the great work.

Instead, you should start saving everything that you’ll want to find again in the future to your own library. No, don’t just bookmark sites when you find them — instead, save the info you wanted to your computer so you can find it directly again without having to reopen a site that may or may not still be there. It’ll only take a second, and next time, you can search locally and find what you need with almost zero effort.

I’m going to recommend using Evernote — there’s a ton of other notebook apps that’d work great too, and even plain text files with the info snippet or PDFs if you want the whole site would work, though, if you really wanted to use something different. But Evernote has three major advantages that make it particularly perfect for building your own google: browser extensions that make it easy to save anything online to your library, apps on every platform, and — crazy as it may sound — integration with Google so you can find what you saved when you search online anyhow.

Here’s what you do. Whenever you need info about anything, Google it as normal. Find what you need, then hit the Evernote extension and clip just the part of the article you actually need and save it to your library. Keep doing that for a while, and at the same time put any other important info in your database as it’s convenient. Whenever you’d write something down, or file something away that’s not a typical file you’d put in your Documents folder, put it in your notebook. You can even get fancy and have IFTTT automatically archive stuff to your Evernote, if you want, or have Instapaper save your favorited articles to Evernote automatically. Basically, anything you think you’d ever want to find again, throw it in Evernote.

Now, after a while, you should be able to start trusting yourself to have info again. Search your computer when you’re looking for something, and Evernote’s results will start showing up more often than not. And hey — if they don’t show up in your search, it’ll take zero extra effort to search the web from your search tool once you’ve typed you’re query in.

Which brings us back to Google. The Evernote browser extension has a nifty extra that lets Evernote display search results from your own library right alongside your Google search results in your browser. If you’ve been saving everything to Evernote and still forget and Google for the answer, Evernote will still bring your saved result to the top and give you one-click access to the info you need without searching through search results.

Will this all make you smarter? I doubt it. Memorizing more data might make you smarter, but that’s a dubious proposition at best these days with so much data thrown at us in modern life. But it will make you a lot less panicked when the internet is out, and you’ll save a lot of time you’d otherwise have spent searching through search results or trying to rediscover data from links in your bookmarks that are long gone.

Originally published on October 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 7

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