How Do You Google?

Let’s face it. We live in a google world. Google has placed information at our fingertips. Google can answer almost any question. As a home school mom, I am a big fan. We google everything. Recipes, stories, math problems, science inquiries, historical facts, music, news, weather, anything. 

Recently Hannah asked me about panda bears. My google history followed her string of questions:  What does a panda bear’s teeth look like? What does a panda bear eat? What does a baby panda look like? What do other bears look like? What does a black bears teeth look like? What do they eat? How do they catch fish? Why do they like to eat fish? What else do they eat? Where do they live? Why do they like honey? Can I see one getting honey? 

For every question, we got a solid answer, pictures, video footage, graphs, charts — you name it, we got it.

Google has helped us on the farm. When we brought home baby calves, I spent an hour watching videos on bottle feeding a calf. There are wonderfully informative videos and tutorials out there on bottling a calf. There is actually a technique and it actually is quite effective.

Google has turned George into a magician. He can fix anything. He does fix everything. If we ever need to fix anything, including our iPhones, we simply look it up and there will be delightful directions on how to repair, reconstruct, rebuild, build, restore anything from a leaky sink, a car axle, our pool pump, heat, air-condition, the tractor, the dishwasher! Seriously, George has kept our iPhones going for several years now. We just order the screen kits or battery kids or speaker kits and he watches a video and we are back to as good as new. 

Googling is very helpful when we are traveling, especially because we do not ever plan ahead and don’t have a clue where we are going or what we are doing. We just follow the road — and google. We can find fun parks, breweries, trails to hike, campgrounds, views, and food. It has made our road trips most exciting.

Googling is also helpful when I am not feeling great. I can google my symptoms and I quickly discover that I’m dying of at least 15 diseases. Usually I can narrow it down to one or two and then decide that I actually don’t feel so bad.

We’ve even scored some extremely helpful marriage advice and raising kids advice by simply googling questions about our issues. 

There is one piece of the google story that I haven’t mentioned yet. I am the worst googler. I think I throw all the algorithms off when I google.  This basically means it takes me twice as long to find anything as it does for George. I talk to google like it is a person. “Hey, google, how do I learn how to braid my daughter’s hair?” Or, “What can I substitute for brown sugar in my muffin recipe?” Or, “How can I not be so angry?” 

That is actually one of the last things I googled. But this time I got some really good advice. As I was sharing it with George — how I intended to practice my new found advice on anger management from google — he asked me, “How did you google that? I have to know!” 

Perhaps I need to ask google the most effective approach to googling.