What do you use search engines for? Research? Shopping? Everything? Stan Schroeder at Mashable has written an interesting look at search engines called “Why Google is Making Us Dumber” that looks at how search engines - and Google in particular - allows people to use less and less of their brain… effectively making them stupid.

While he makes some good points, I have to disagree with his assertion that Google (or any other search engine) is the problem here. Mr. Schroeder… we’ve been getting dumber for a long time. Google isn’t the cause but is, instead, just a quick way to speed up the process.

The problem is basic human nature. We want everything to be as easy as possible. We don’t want to have to think.  We don’t even want to remember anything (we make lists of things to do, groceries to buy, etc).  If you think about it, a vast majority of human evolution, technological growth, and scientific advancement has had the sole purpose of making things easier on us.

We don’t want to remember phone numbers… so we carry cell phones/PDAs/etc. We don’t want to have to remember to watch our favorite television shows… so we Tivo them. We don’t want to have to learn even the most basic of math… so we have calculators (and the abacus before that). I could go on and on.

Search engines like Google simply facilitate the culmination of all these existing tools into one place. I can look up any phone number I want, get recaps of any shows that I’ve missed (including video), and do all that new-fangled math from one place… instead of two or three or seven. Roll that around in your head for a while and it might actually make sense to say that search engines are a smart answer to the question of how to dumb us down.

If we can’t even be bothered to remember the phone numbers, birthdays, etc of those nearest and dearest to us, why would we bother to remember a URL to an article? The average American can’t complete a fairly straightforward algebraic equation. Is it so much of a surprise that they’d use Google for mathematics?

People have been getting dumber for much longer than Google has even existed. So no… search engines are not making us dumber. They’re just making it easier. And that’s what human nature demands - a quick, easy answer.

Even to the question of how to make sure we’re all as dumb as possible.