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Google is ruining everything!
I don't understand people who cry about how creepy Google is.
They have something called GoogleBase now where you can upload "anything" and it gets put into databases based on category, IE, a blog database, a podcast database. We went and looked up a recipe database and were amazed and impressed by the sheer number of recipes that came up for each search.
Then the crying started.
"It's creepy!" Yeah, god forbid you should be able to find a cheesecake recipe online. It's totally weird that Google has neatly put them all into one easy-to-find-and-search location instead of forcing you to use a generic search engine to hunt down recipes scattered across millions of sites on the internet.
"I feel like I don't get to choose anymore! I just get to click!" Because Google having 10,000 recipes featuring cheese isn't giving you a choice? For your information, "choose" is defined as "to select from a number of possible alternatives." The clicking is part of what we in the biz call the choosing process.
"I'm offered so many options I feel like it's impossible to decide!" Being indecisive isn't an excuse to take your issues out on information; take it from someone who's indecisive. Or maybe it's just a natural result of you being 70 years old and confused by the intarweb?
"Are we controlling Google... or is Google controlling us?"
(All of these being actual quotes from my class.)
Look, it's information. Yes, there's a lot of it. Yes, it can be overwhelming. Yes, it has an extremely broad application.
No, it's not fucking ruining your life.
Why is it creepy to have many different recipes to choose from? Someone complained that they could spend two hours looking for a recipe to make for dinner and then dinner would wind up two hours late. First of all, Google isn't going to tell you what to have for dinner, despite what some of my classmates think. You need to have some preference already in mind and you need to be prepared to eventually decide, shut off the computer, and go make the damn food. Second of all, if you have a collection of five or more cookbooks, and you don't have a preference in mind, you're still going to be inundated with choices. You will still spend two hours reading through those cookbooks to find a recipe if you're that indecisive.
And in the end, you know you're just going to give up and make ramen. If you're me.
But seriously. Having recipes online is not creepy. Not even if there's 10,000 of them. It's a database, hence GoogleBase.
It means I don't have to spend $1000 amassing an equivalent resource of physical cookbooks.
They have something called GoogleBase now where you can upload "anything" and it gets put into databases based on category, IE, a blog database, a podcast database. We went and looked up a recipe database and were amazed and impressed by the sheer number of recipes that came up for each search.
Then the crying started.
"It's creepy!" Yeah, god forbid you should be able to find a cheesecake recipe online. It's totally weird that Google has neatly put them all into one easy-to-find-and-search location instead of forcing you to use a generic search engine to hunt down recipes scattered across millions of sites on the internet.
"I feel like I don't get to choose anymore! I just get to click!" Because Google having 10,000 recipes featuring cheese isn't giving you a choice? For your information, "choose" is defined as "to select from a number of possible alternatives." The clicking is part of what we in the biz call the choosing process.
"I'm offered so many options I feel like it's impossible to decide!" Being indecisive isn't an excuse to take your issues out on information; take it from someone who's indecisive. Or maybe it's just a natural result of you being 70 years old and confused by the intarweb?
"Are we controlling Google... or is Google controlling us?"
(All of these being actual quotes from my class.)
Look, it's information. Yes, there's a lot of it. Yes, it can be overwhelming. Yes, it has an extremely broad application.
No, it's not fucking ruining your life.
Why is it creepy to have many different recipes to choose from? Someone complained that they could spend two hours looking for a recipe to make for dinner and then dinner would wind up two hours late. First of all, Google isn't going to tell you what to have for dinner, despite what some of my classmates think. You need to have some preference already in mind and you need to be prepared to eventually decide, shut off the computer, and go make the damn food. Second of all, if you have a collection of five or more cookbooks, and you don't have a preference in mind, you're still going to be inundated with choices. You will still spend two hours reading through those cookbooks to find a recipe if you're that indecisive.
And in the end, you know you're just going to give up and make ramen. If you're me.
But seriously. Having recipes online is not creepy. Not even if there's 10,000 of them. It's a database, hence GoogleBase.
It means I don't have to spend $1000 amassing an equivalent resource of physical cookbooks.
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It's clearly an exciting and dynamic profession, yes.
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*raises hand* Permission to slap everyone in your class?
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These same people would be delighted if Academic Cookbooks Quarterly published a database with HALF as many recipes for cheese, but when Google does it, it becomes a work of evil. XD So go figure.
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(Anonymous) 2008-07-25 08:02 am (UTC)(link)...but Apple on the other hand...