Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner

Science 14 July 2011: 1207745Published online 14 July 2011 [DOI:10.1126/science.1207745]

Abstract: The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

a doctoral thesis on natural language processing from the University of Gothenburg shows that it is also important to look at the terms people type into the search box.

’Users usually know what kind of information they are looking for, but they don’t know what question to ask. The problem these days is not for the search engine to locate the right documents but to make the most relevant texts end up towards the top of the list,’ says the author of the thesis Karin Friberg Heppin.

Friberg Heppin used a database of medical texts written in Swedish to explore what makes a search term effective or ineffective. What are the features of good search terms and what characterises bad ones?

Today patients often find their own information on the internet, both before and after seeing a doctor. However, not all documents are easily understood by a lay person. Doctors surf for information too, but won’t find much new in popular science texts.

’The language differs between texts written for doctors and texts written for patients. People can use these differences to find the types of documents they want, with respect to both subject and target group,’ says Friberg Heppin.

Her point is that if a doctor does a search for, say, the word flu, he or she will not find many texts of interest. Yet, a search for the word influenza will yield more texts that suit the needs of doctors.

via ResourceBlog