Got a question? Let me Google that for you
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Remember the days when a computer problem would prompt you to call your tech-savvy uncle, who would walk you through the troubleshooting process? When you’d call your aunt, the chef, for a recipe, or, for plumbing questions, your friend Joe, the plumber. (No, not that Joe the Plumber.)
That was so 20th century. Now, we have this thing called Google that can tell you exactly where to find the answer to anything. It has spoiled us, really. Punch in a question and, within a second, you have thousands, sometimes millions, of Web pages offering solutions.
Last month, I called my brother, a musician with decades of experience, to help me with a guitar problem. ‘OK, have you heard of this thing called Google?’ he asked condescendingly. ‘You go to this website, Google.com, and type into that box whatever it is that you want to know.’
This isn’t an uncommon case. You’ll find users all over the Web talking down to people who ask questions that could easily be solved using a brief search query. Numerous blog posts (My 4-year-old told me to ‘Google It’) and an informational yet tetchy website, called Just F---ing Google It.com, have sprung up to illustrate how easy it is to elicit answers from machines instead of people.
Jim Garvin, co-founder and software developer for Cubenot, and software engineer Ryan McGeary have given the impatient champions of Google their most elaborate tool yet. Let Me Google That For You allows users to enter a search query, then it delivers them ...
... a custom URL to send to friends or post on an Internet forum.
When someone -- presumably the target of your heckling -- clicks on the link, the website patronizingly demonstrates how to use Google, asks, ‘Was that so hard?’ and then takes the appropriately chastened recipient to the search results page.
The idea came about yesterday during a lunch between Garvin and fellow software developers, he said in an e-mail. ‘’Let me Google that for you’ is something I think most people in the IT field have had to say to someone they were frustrated with,’ Garvin wrote. ‘For me and a few people I know, it happens with regular frequency.’
After the lunch, Garvin immediately went to work on coding Let Me Google That For You. The website, which launched this morning, has already racked up more than 250,000 hits.
The applications are endless. Let’s say, for example, that you are my brother and you get an e-mail from me about how to hook up my guitar to record music on a Mac. You reply to my message with this link, then revel in having knocked off a piece of my dignity. Fun, right?
-- Mark Milian