Yes, we certainly live in a different world and its easy to forget that common usage of the internet is only about 18 years old.
I’ve always liked reference books and have accumulated an assortment over the years. They give me pleasure sitting in a bookcase and are occasionally browsed out of curiosity. The colour plates of the human body in the Encyclopaedia Britannica are far superior to pixels on a screen.
Still…Google is My Friend. And I wouldn’t be without it. 
God forbid you ever have to gas up a 56 Chevy. You’ll never find the gas cap if you don’t have some oldtimer with you, or access to google.
But yeah- google knows everything.
Hotbot, Alta Vista, Dogpile (yes. Dogpile), Excite, Bing…just a few search engines we used before Google.
I had the same problem with my Fit. Pulled up to the pump to fill up for the first time, and couldn’t figure it out. Looked for a button, a lever, anything! After 5 minutes of frustration, I pulled over to the parking area and started digging through the glove compartment for the owner’s manual, which finally gave me the answer.
Man, did I feel like an idiot.
I’m reminded of a friend in Grad School, who told the story of his first night in the house he and his wife had just bought–in other words, first time homeowners. In the morning, he discovered that the toilet was leaking.
So he called Dad. Who said “What do you expect me to do from half a continent away?”
And he said “Nothing. But I had a problem, and when I have a problem, I call my Dad. Now that I’ve talked to you, I’ll start trying to figure out how to solve the problem”.
That was the point of the story, so I don’t recall whether this ended up being the start of an adventure in home repair, or if he ended up calling the plumber next.
It’s in behind one of the tail lights. Not sure which one but there are only two to try. There are also ones behind number plates on certain mid 60s Chev Impalas and mid 70s Holden Kingswoods.
Yeah! I think Dad had an early Chrysler Valiant where the fuel cap was behind the number plate.
Good god. These are the people who buy Honda Fits.
I started university around the time when Google was really starting to take off. I stopped buying textbooks in my last couple of years, mostly, because if there was any shit at the undergraduate level that I might need to read a book to know, I could probably just look it up on Wikipedia or something and get a better explanation than whatever $150 out of date pile of dead tree the University was trying to foist on me. Other than that, all I ever needed was occasianlly to get some test questions or some shit off a copy of the text in the library and I made it through university without buyign textbooks. Not with particularly good marks mind you, because I was a lazy good for nothing drunk, not because I didn’t buy the books.
Do university students today still buy books, other than serious graduate level/engineering/medicine or really high level reference material? Surely people no longer buy “Introduction to Linguistics” or “Basic Microeconomics” anymore?
Any hobbies that I have and am engaged in immediately make me wonder how the heck I knew anything about them before the interwebs.
I used to build R/C cars, trucks and boats (electric) and then starting building nitro powered R/C cars, trucks and boats all prior to getting on-line. I have no idea how I sourced everything as far as parts, but the sheer am’t of information I didn’t have makes me wonder how the heck I succeeded.
When I got older, I got into high-performance boating (life-sized stuff) and whenever I have an issue now I cannot imagine not having access to the internet.
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Speaking of rental cars:
I was on the island of Martinique, and driving a manual French car (Renault or Peugot). It was very late at night, and I had reached the end of a long peninsula into the ocean. It was very remote, no one else around. I needed to turn around, and there wasn’t quite enough space to turn around without going into reverse. I could not figure out how to put the car into reverse. Besides moving the gear shift into the slot, you always have to do something like push the knob down or pull it up. Nothing worked. And there was no Owner’s Manual. I tried rolling the car forward and back, so I wouldn’t have to go into reverse at all, but it didn’t work. I even tried pushing it back, but couldn’t. I thought of walking back to get help, but it would have been pretty far, and I didn’t want to leave my luggage in the car. So after trying everything I could think of, I just sat there, trying to think of what to do next.
Finally I said to myself: “Look, this is a car. It’s designed so that even an idiot can figure out how to run it. There has to be something really, really simple that I’m overlooking.” Sure enough, there was a little collar right under the gear shift knob that you had to pull up while shifting.
Yeah, Google would have helped.
Yes, but he was just so good in every other way that I’m inclined to forgive him. Not least of which was giving us the car for app. $800 less than all of the other dealers were offering.
Yep my Ford Contour (Mondeo in Europe) was like that. The salesman didn’t even know how to get it in reverse but we finally figured it out. The manual transmission ones were rare in the US, I had to drive 100 miles or so to purchase it.
In the Pit thread Zoo Cancels Free Days, I mentioned that I’d seen an elephant with a hard on at the Houston Zoo and that it was quite impressive. Someone subsequently posted that they had Googled “elephant erection” to check on the matter.
There was a time when it would’ve taken some effort to find a photo of an elephant erection.
Google returns over a million results. You can quickly check out an elephant erection on YouTube, flickr, Photobucket, and various nature sites.
And, just in case it gives you ideas, Google has ads for Cialis and Viagra.
Slightly off-track: there’s a great throwaway line from a recent Big Time Rush TV movie. (It’s essentially Nickelodeon’s ripoff/homage to the Monkees if you’re not familiar.) While the actors are actually in their mid-twenties they’re playing teenagers and whilst they were being chased through the streets of London by assassins (as happens when you’re in a boy band) and one of them shouts “Oh thank goodness, a phonebooth!” to which the Carlos character replies “What’s a phonebooth?!” I literally went: :smack: but seriously do like 16 year-olds know what a phone booth/payphone is? Only if they’re Superman fans I’m guessing!
Yeah I was Skyping with this actual teenager the other day and being all Grandpa Simpson-y saying like “Man when I was your age we didn’t have the internet and instead of looking stuff up on Wikipedia we had to go to the library and look things up in the actual encyclopedia.” He said: “Encyclopedia?” He didn’t know what that was.
It’s the thing wikipedia was named after.
I used to go to the library all the time for reference material. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature was one of my favorite sources and I also spent a lot of time with microfilm of the newspapers also. I still go to the library quite often, but not for reference searches. I will look up something online even when I know the answer is in a book 20 feet from my computer.
It is lucky that a lot of the skills are actually transferable to the internet.
I’m getting to the point where I’m thinking about getting a smartphone since it is annoying to not be able to get an immediate answer if I’m not sitting in a wifi hot spot.
But I’m double sad because he obviously never read any Encyclopedia Brown books growing up.
Song lyrics! And thanks to SoundHound on my mobile, I can even hum a few bars and it’ll usually pull up the song.
I have a serious question. What’s the advantage of a Google search over a Yahoo search? I have used Google maybe five times in my life. What’s so great about it?
Well, you’d know if you just Googled it.
Seriously? Why don’t you give it a try and then you tell us?
Obviously, it’s a matter of taste. It’s a very similar thing but the format and the results are a little different.