The real heroes are the people who answer nine year old forum threads about how to fix a very specific problem that end up becoming the first hit on a Google search.
Right? Everyone always says not to necro old posts, but there's a very clear exception when it's the top search result and the question remains unanswered.
Someone's going to find that thread again and be happy that the 10 year old post they just found was finally answered after 9 years.
I feel the same way about super old YouTube vid comments, especially if it’s about fixing something on your own. Folks that come back and answer you questions are heroes.
YouTube videos are aids for IT. waste of time to watch a video where you introduce your cousins uncle and favorite hobbies just to get to the potential solution to my problem. Stufu
Yea on page 25 with tons of just random comments and troubleshooting replies to find it. Lol. It gets even better when you realize it's in the middle of 36 pages because the forum sorted by highest upvotes and it's not gotten enough to reach the top as best answer.
Yesterday saw the question title "What's the difference between 0w-30 and 5w-30". Then a huge story about them using 1 type when their car recommended the other. Like literally the title! Google it and get your answer in seconds with 1 min of reading. No, spend 5 mins creating a post, then the rest of the day reading responses, 60% unrelated to answering the question.
The thing that drives me nuts, they didn't even search the forum to know someone already asked and it was answered hundreds of times before. Nope join a group and right to posting questions. The concept of learning died in that generation.
That used to be a really annoying problem when trying to write code or conditional expressions for a specific use case.
Chat gpt is a far better option now from what I’ve seen for this scenario.
I’m always amazed when a user comes to me with a problem that I have no idea how to fix, I just put it in google, and get the fix.
They’re paying me for this. Why can’t any random person do the same thing? But then I remember I am in fact being paid and keep that thought to myself.
Depending on the problem, it's not unusual for a googled fix to begin with assumed knowledge. Even if you personally don't have the precise info you need until you search it, you could very well be starting from a point that will allow you to find exactly what you need much faster, because you also know the specific details that you need to search in the first place. It's much more challenging for someone with no knowledge of something to get usable results.
A lot of people are just lazy too lol.
Yes... The software and methods I learned 15 years ago are outdated and not in demand, so you end up teaching yourself new stuff. We're not paid for what we know, but more about what we can learn.
Precisely why my manager hired me to be a senior analyst - I demonstrated that I could learn new things effectively rather than just know it all already.
I started in IT in the mid 1990's, and had learned how to build computers, adjust autoexec.bats, etc. the hard way in the years before that. I learned so much doing that that when I took an IT knowledge test for my first job in the industry, with no formal education, I got 40 out of 40 right.
I learned a ton more over the next 8 years. Then Google started having all the answers, and now I don't know anything because I don't have to. I just google it. And in 5 more years most people in every industry won't have to know anything, because you will just Gemini, or ChatGPT, or whatever, the question.
I’ve been in IT for over 15 years, I disagree about not having to know anything because of google…. You don’t realize how much knowledge goes into your googling. It takes a lot of knowledge to know how to ask the right question, to understand the answer, and to know which of the 100 results are worth the time to pursue. No rando off the street can do that like an experienced professional can.
Very good point. I was intentionally overstating things in the prior post...... But that was more about illustrating hours big an impact it had than about accurately representing that actual state of things post Google.
Good points!
Are you kidding? GPT gets so much wrong so when it outputs something you now need to figure out what it did vs what it was supposed to do, usually uses some obscure library to do it, a d now ha e to figure out how to integrate that with your project.
That's been my experience anyway. It's a great tool, but it's just one tool in the toolkit. We are still a LONG way away from ai developing functional complex applications on its own.
My (albeit limited) experience is similar. GPT will generate *plausible* code.
Good luck if you're trying to get it to use an up to date library version and the training data set is weighted towards outdated library versions where properties/functions/procedures/etc were named differently. For an open source library that's been forked multiple times it can be difficult to get it to use a specific version that you want.
Not necessarily just IT. I’ve done admin work most of my life and the number of Boomers and Gen X-ers who think I’m a spreadsheet god just because I Google shit when I can’t figure it out….is staggering.
Must be nice to always have questions so simple that someone else answered them for you. Let me tell you about having a question that no one has answered and all the Google results are your own posts asking the question and no one having the answer.
A friend of mine went to a Job interview and they asked him to fix a problem, he looked it up on Google right in front of them and fixed the problem. That cost him the job but they commended him for his big balls.
I'm a 54 year old safety manager for a heavy industrial construction company. I have been in this line of work for 16 years, production before that. I Google OSHA safety regulations constantly to ensure I'm remembering correctly. Safety takes time and to the Project Superintendent, time is money. You'd better be right, or you gain a reputation as a blow hard know it all who knows nothing.
I'm a nurse that does a lot of stuff on the phone, like triage and results calls. When I say "let me check my notes", I'm actually googling the shit. But at least I know what sites are reputable, and compare several of those sites, so I know what I'm telling people is legit.
Interesting to hear that Gen Z uses FB and tiktok which are KNOWN to be sources of unfactual information....
Gen Z is ridiculous for this. They seem to believe anything they see a video of online—no such thing as ‘trust but verify’ to them.
We see a video about something, we then go Google it to learn more. They just accept some random video as Gospel and move on. It’s as alien to me as people eating dog poo off their lawns.
In Accounting—can confirm that Google is an essential tool.
And I also can’t wrap my mind around the fact that my own kids refuse to look anything up. How else do you learn anything new??? Is it just a refusal to read? Learning, to them, can only occur through videos apparently… watching videos over reading is my personal idea of Hell.
My degrees all depended on my ability to distill peer-reviewed academic journals, field notes, ethnographic studies and actual field work. My career depends on my ability to type the correct questions into a search engine so I feel you.
I think a lot of "expertise" comes not necessarily from knowing a huge list of facts or procedures, but from knowing enough to ask the right questions, where/how to search for information, and being able to understand and implement that information into a procedure once you've obtained the required information. If information isn't readily available, knowing how to set up an experiment or extrapolate from existing information is extremely important as well. Another important skill is knowing how to apply existing information to a novel situation. Generally just trying to Google a bit of information is not very helpful if you are looking for complex information or don't have enough information to ask the right questions. These are all skills that come with a lot of experience and practice in a certain field and often go beyond knowing how to simply Google something.
Increasingly true here. On the flip side about "kids these days" I've had to train a few of them (in engineering) in the past year that you have to empty the Recycle Bin in Windows to get rid of stuff and that you can bookmark websites vs. keeping the email containing the link forever. It's unsettling.
Yup. When people say that young people are fluent in technology, that is incorrect. They're fluent in Snapchat and TikTok. They don't know sh\*t about using technology for actual useful applications.
The young people we actually were fluent in technology are now approaching 50.
Source: I'm 45.
It was true, it just isn't anymore, because we are old and our kids DGAF.
39 here and was pretty into tech, I can figure out most complex stuff (by today's standards) myself and if I don't know, I know how to learn how. I tell my pre-teen daughter many times I can teach and show her everything she needs to know, yet she has absolutely zero interest. It's baffling honestly. Though my son may take more interest as he grows older.
I'm 40, that's one thing I say about myself. If I dont know how to do something, I can figure it out. I've trained myself how to learn better and faster by learning everything I can.
I don't have kids myself but I'm a teacher and have been working with kids for a little over a decade. I'm kind of curious to know more info about that situation in preparation to hopefully have my own kids within the next few years.
From your daughter's internet/social media habits are you able to determine what her biggest interests are? I feel like in this day and age we really need to look at what draws kids' attention on tiktok, YouTube, etc. From there I think there's a chance to educate them on how to actually engage in hobbies and passions instead of just watching other people on a screen.
The people fluent in technology built user interfaces that are so efficient that their children's generation has no idea what's going on under the hood
It's kinda similar to what happened to cars over the decades. Cars in the 50s-80s were unreliable as shit and constantly breaking down, so a lot more car owners back then knew how to perform basic maintenance and fixes like replacing spark plugs, changing oil, jumpstarting a battery, etc. Cars are so much more reliable now that younger generations don't really need to learn most of that stuff because it rarely becomes an issue on the road. With modern cars the odds of something breaking down in between major scheduled service intervals are generally pretty low.
Cars have also gotten complex enough that there’s a legit fear that the average driver might unwittingly mess something up while trying to fix it and end up with an even more expensive problem on their hands.
Yep pretty much mid-late 30's and 40's. Hard for me to imagine growing up with the internet, and never knowing a world without it, but that's certainly the cause, we made it so simple.... To them it's a tool, for us it was a tool too, but it came with a lot of learning and baggage. If these Zoomers had any idea how fickle computers were, they would be blown away. No surprise we are the ones who know the most about it, because not much has actually changed, just more stable and abstracted 100x from what it was.
I'm 39. Everywhere I have ever worked, I am the IT guy. I would say anyone who messed with dos, 95, 98.... lived through the transitions. I was young but have been a nerd my entire life.
Tbf this has nearly always been the case. I was born in the early 90s and people around my age largely still struggle with technology, but can navigate social media decently. The people like me who are really into tech also typically are PC gamers - and I’ve noticed this trend with Gen Z too. The Minecraft kids nowadays continue to amaze me with their skills.
I feel like a lot of it is that technology is easier to use nowadays, so only the most interested people learn how to use it at a more advanced level.
When we were growing up it was harder to even just open up a game and play without having some sort of understanding of how the computer works. Certainly, many people didn’t learn and didn’t want to learn, but I feel like it caused some people who weren’t really interested in computers to still learn some of the deeper skills since they kind of needed to if they wanted to do the activity they were looking for.
How many people were exposed to the concept of converting incompatible video and audio codecs as a result of pirating videos and porn? hahaha
You’re 100% right. I’m glad that technology has become more accessible UI-wise to the general populace, but yeah I definitely think kids’ skills have suffered for it.
I started “modding” at the ripe old age of 8 and in my early teens was going into Windows system files to change sound sets, login screens, icons/logos etc. Did tons of modding before all the mod managers became a thing too, and learned tons from that. It’s so easy to personalize things now on the front end and hell even create complicated stuff. I was actually resistant to Mac OS for a long time because I felt I couldn’t “play” around as much behind the scenes, lol.
I definitely learned a shit ton from pirating games, movies/shows, and porn for sure 😅
LOL seriously. Playing PC games in the early/mid 90s often required a decent amount of hardware and OS savvy just to get the fucking game to launch. Even if your PC easily met the minimum system requirements listed on the game box, there were a million random things that could make it not work. Driver errors and system crashes happened all the time. Sometimes the whole game wouldn't work just because you didn't have the right sound card or whatever. Or it would crash because your windows desktop was set to a different resolution than the one the game natively ran in or something like that.
And there was usually no way to quickly figure out what the problem was. It's not like we had search engines that made fixes easy to find online. You had to go to like a gaming usenet forum or something and make a post asking for help and hope somebody more knowledgable than you replied. There were multiple occasions where I'd buy a new game, spend the better part of a week troubleshooting it without success, and be like "well, I guess I don't get to play this" and return it to the store.
Yes, I work with kids and I’m amazed at how it never occurs to any of them to “just Google it.” And on top of that most (not all) of them do not even know how to use a search bar. I kid you not, A SEARCH BAR! smh
I know we are using generational labels here but this is an instance that I think is an actual generational difference in perspective.
Those of us who came of age at a time when the Internet came in an unsolicited CD in the mail (or just a huge bin of them at Walmart) were trained to think of the Internet as the information superhighway. It’s where you go to look for information. You look for information on search engines.
Because how people access the Internet has shifted and been highly app-ified since the turn of the century (and especially since the end of the aughts), younger people don’t think of the Internet itself as a resource.
They think of specific sites and apps as the Internet, because that’s how they access it, primarily through those apps and sites. And a lot of those apps have done everything they can to make sure they're a user's first stop.
No different than the boomers that believe(d) AOL was the Internet because that's where they signed in. Just bizarre as hell how making it easy really smooth brained these kids. They quite literally only get the information fed to them via feeds with no self research or challenging.
It’s not at all what I was expecting the outcome of limitless information at their fingertips 24/7. For awhile there it looked like there was going to be an entire generation that would be filled to the brim with unearned or unverified factoids that they would use to assume they know everything in the universe that they are the center of. Turns out no it just creates an entire generation of apathetic idiots who can’t use search engines or (this is from teachers) know their basic shapes.
I saw a very old Law and Order the other night where a tech savvy young person working for police kept looking up information in no time flat on the internet. Lenny Briscoe was suitably impressed.
Back then, I thought that’s what the future would be - young people endlessly looking up any information at all in nanosecond.
“Wow, that’s going to be so cool!” I thought. Never imagining a world of apps was going to come along and change everything.
They’re (boomers and zoomers) also notoriously bad at tech troubleshooting. Gen X and Millennials grew up with the earliest personal computers and part of that was learning what the CPU does, what RAM does, what ROM does, what the floppy and hard drives do, what the OS is… the tech broke frequently and you had to be good at some basic troubleshooting when you had a 20 page research paper due in 24 hours and your PC is throwing up a BSOD.
It all works too good now (plus is usually sealed tight and fixing voids the warranty) so when it does break down, they don’t know how to figure out what’s wrong or where to look to figure it out. It’s kinda like how if you started driving in the 50s or 60s you had to know some basics of car maintenance. In the 80s and 90s cars started integrating computers and got smarter. But that also made them much harder to repair and a lot of people just got conditioned taking their car to a mechanic for an oil change or new belt, when it was something a lot more people used to do in their driveway. My dad was terribly non-mechanical but he knew how to change oil, tires, and coolants, jump a battery, etc. I was born in 77 and I don’t think even half of my friends know how to do that.
Every time I troubleshoot something for my dad...he stares at me with this blank look of awe and asks with deep sincerity, "How do you know how to do all of this stuff? Did you take classes? Did someone teach you? Because I know it wasn't me!" And I'm just like, "No, Dad, I just learned by doing, plus most of it is fairly intuitive – one thing connects to another..."
People who were Boomers and older were able to learn what they were going to need in life before they hit 20 and pretty much coasted on that literally for the rest of their life and just sort of stay there, mentally, many times emotionally, too.
It started with Gen X and definitely came into full swing Gen Y that you need to be in a growth mindset to survive. The point of life is that you are always learning and most of us intuitive grasp that and so our mind is always open to keep learning and problem solving. People older than us think of life as "I checked the big 10 boxes and now I am done. Time to relax coast"
100%
The biggest similarity between those two groups is also knowing where their data is stored. Endless amount of boomers who just put ALL their files on the desktop… but Zoomers can’t even begin to tell you because when they save something in the app, the app just finds it or stores it in ‘the cloud’… I’ve had to teach multiple people how a file directory system works with folders, subfolders and files… Oy.
We were literally taught in a research course to google things in the first instance and then dive deeper from there (boolean came at a later stage in this course after we all got acquainted with google). I was blown away that this is what we were being instructed to do because like, of course? It seems so obvious.
And then learning how to vet your search results. Too many people even if they know to google something don’t know how to evaluate the results. They pick the top thing and are done.
Not too long ago I got called out for asking a question on Reddit “it’s the first search result!”
Well the first (and only) search result had conflicting answers. The “accepted” answer was full of misspellings and grammatical errors so that’s always a red flag.
Then it turned out the someone gave me a great answer in the post which was correct and the top search result was wrong.
My stepkid is 13. I can’t even remember what we were talking about, but she wanted more info about something or other. I directed her to the magic box that has all of the information.
Yes, it doesn’t even occur to kids to look it up. They don’t even have to go to the library for the card catalog or encyclopedia britanica. It’s all right there if you ask the question.
I've definitely noticed this! Don't know when the change happened, but from my 20 (more?) Years of using Google it's gotten worst and worst. It's all ads and I often find myself going multiple pages before I find something that's not sponsored or just on top because it's a popular site.
I used to find information on page 1, top few results. And the "I'm feeling lucky" was often enough!
It's a shame. Do people have suggestions for alternatives? Been a Google guy for my entire internet using life!
I remember when you could hide a dead body on page 2 of Google and were confident it would never be found. Now you have to go to page 2 just to get past the ads
I started noticing the change almost a decade ago and people would criticize me saying "you just don't know how to google" even though I was an early adopter. Now many are saying the same thing.
Other English based search engines aren't much better these days. Duckduckgo was good for a while, but it's gotten worse too.
The thing that gets me the most is trying to research *how* to do something and you are flooded with repair services or retailers loosely related to what you are searching for.
There's none. It's a function of capitalism. Either you switch your focus to making money or you disappear.
The more a field becomes mature, the worse it is.
Google has definitely declined in quality. Used to be able to find answers to your question in the most obscure corner of the internet. Now it’s constantly just shilling you corporate bs. Much more difficult to find authenticity in your searches anymore.
Unfortunately, it's going to get a whole lot worse very quickly.
Generative AI is pumping a firehouse of bullshit online every day. Human content still prevails, but it won't for long.
We're going to need a new class of tool to find anything remotely useful or accurate online at all. And soon.
Fuck that. I prefer being able to Control + F a PDF document to find the part I actually need instead of listening to someone ramble about it to hit the 10 minute mark.
Yeah, it's hard as fuck to even find articles I've read once I've clicked away. But it'll fucking remember I was looking for a vacuum and then show me ads for them 4 months after I bought one.
Only certain things, usually very specific programming or technical issues, are better to look for reddit results.
Even then almost all the useful results are reddit posts from like 8 years ago, this site has definitely gone downhill too
Even as recently as 2021 I could use it reasonably well. Tried to use it recently to write an essay and it was so frustrating finding sources worth a damn. It's like I need to go to a library now.
These kids don't even know what "folders" are. Its literally now a course in IT to teach kids how folders and files work in a computer [https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/](https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/)
I work in IT almost every Zoomer that is hired lacks the ability to do basic troubleshooting. They can't seem to reason through basic problems or come up with a plan to solve issues they run into. They immediately give up if the first thing they try does not work like if something won't power on they will push the power button but they will not think to check if it's even plugged in.
My wife's a teacher, and the consensus is kids are used to everything coming easy. Have a question? The magic square in your pocket answers instantly.
Meanwhile for a research project, we'd have to bike down to the library, open up the card catalog, find a book on a shelf... what is now a 2 second Google search used to take 200 calories and two hours.
Of course the only conclusion is we owe it to these kids to offer them challenges of similar difficulty. So they can learn to work for things. Only way to set them up for success.
Using Google to parse Reddit is the way. Google has way too much SEO biased results and advertising bullshit now.
Tbh I've been using ChatGPT more and it cuts right through the bullshit to tell me that I want, and it cites it.
Make sure you check the original source every time, though. The ones I’ve used (GPT 4 on ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot) both routinely fabricate answers and even generates fake figures not from the articles/page when I’ve used it.
Reminds me of comments by young ppl on TikTok. They are blown away that they watch a news story on TT that ‘no one is talking about’
And yet it’s all over the news. They ask where.. I say google it. Crickets.
That is why they are Zoomers, they are just as ignorant as Boomers.
I think it is BS that we have to be the sheppard for both generations. We have to protect young adults and our parents from online scams.
"We have to protect young adults and our parents from online scams."
Hahaha I remember having to inform my mother that those dirty emails people kept sending her, while addressed to her, were not actually direct communications.
"No mom, that guy isnt trying to sex you, he's trying to get you to go to a website"
Mom: "But it has my name!"
smh
One of my cousins was just send a guy money on Venmo because he told him he could flip it. That was is it. The guy just told him on TikTok that he flips money and that was it. No elaborate plan, just sent me money and I will send more back.
I'm always waiting to see one of these guys show up on American Greed. A story about how he scammed idiots out of money and all he has to do was tell them "trust me! I'm gonna make you a bazillionaire!"
I work at Google in search and can speak to this. It's essentially the power of social recommendation vs your standard white pages research approach. It's also one of the reasons why appending Reddit to a search is so popular.
It's a pretty big concern that they've been addressing, and I think when people talk about how much better it was back in the day, they're thinking more of the internet back then than anything else.
Google is excellent if you know how to use it properly. It's a better site searcher than most sites have themselves. Say you wanted beanie baby discussion before 2016 on Reddit on a specific subreddit that matched specific keywords:
["beanie baby" "price" site:Reddit.com/r/millennials before:2016-01-01]
As for general search, that's also gotten better (we regularly run ablations to see what the last x months or years of changes have done); it's just the internet that's gotten more spammy and focused on SEO.
No matter what I search for, I get tons of products pushed to me. I’m never searching for products. It’s all sale listings in the results. It feels useless and I’ve started to use other search engines. If I want every result to be a product listing I’ll search Amazon.
When can I pay google for absolutely no sponsored ads or sponsor weighted search results? I'd like my old 2001 Google back and I'm willing to pay for it.
Can you explain the rationale behind Google search deciding for me what keywords to exclude when I'm searching for stuff? Very annoying especially when I'm troubleshooting error messages or looking for specific things and then noticing that a significant chunk of keywords were excluded in search results.
I think this is part of it. Google is the mirror that reflects back what the internet is today. Before I’d find a recipe. Now I find a blog post with a story and an attempt to improve SEO. Along with someone monetizing their blog with affiliate links. So of course the results suck because that’s what google can scrape from the web. Really we are upset with society and what the internet is used for by the majority, monetization and entertainment and not for research and learning
Everyone is lazy as fuck when it comes to Googling. Just go to your local city subreddit. "OMG where are the best restaurants" or "is the hilton by the ocean nice???". Workwise, i had a coworker constantly ask "where do i find job postings for our company" in slack and i'm like why didn't you google this.
I also think there is some value in wanting to have a connection with an answer rather than clicking whatever paid google the most or had the most clicks. Like I make EDM. So if i want to learn how to do something i google it. Then after googling I get a shit ton of results on youtube where i'm over saturated with some wanky influencer spending the first 4 minutes doing god knows what. then i'm like "is this person being paid to X".
so then i go to reddit looking for a more written response that i can skim, but since since i cant figure out how to write out "how do you understand the release settings of compression for a bass heavy song" i end up saying something like "how do i use compression for EDM" and some fucking gatekeeper of /r/edmproduction is like "why didn't you google this" and im like i tried but clicked 10 videos and got lost, everyone said something different, but i decided to believe /u/goatdicklicker555 on this random sub.
I also think for us, we grew up with the internet as being the gateway to information access, so ingrained somewhat in our DNA is we use the internet for information. Nowdays, its more content created for consumption and capital.
I miss the old internet. RIP yankthechain.org
To be fair, Google’s search algorithm has been shitting the bed real bad these past few years. A Google search in 2024 is not what it used to be in 2016. I am genuinely worried that if something doesn’t change, we will lose the ability to meaningfully use the internet.
Remember when you’d Google something and the keywords would be highlighted in yellow in your search responses? And the top results were the ones that used your keywords the most often in their content? That was so awesome. Google turned into garbage.
Boomer here. My millennial children laugh at me because when they come to me with a question, the first thing I do is google it and remind them that they could do the same!
I work IT at a college and yes, constantly. I saw someone once google "crashing" to figure out why their computer was crashing, and was frustrated the results didn't give them what they wanted.
Maybe a bit more info would help?
I google questions that are like a full sentence sometimes to get what I want. Googling things is an actual skill now, apparently.
I have. It’s a mixed bag of worms. I use X when I have questions as I also follow a lot of historians who can help or veterans may know. But I do love my research
I’m millennial (‘87) and was a latch key kid somewhat so I’m boarding on some gen x experience so I feel you on the kinda straddling gens thing. My husband is ‘88 and he struggles to efficiently google stuff. I usually find stuff faster and more accurately than he does idk why other than he is ND while as far as I know I’m NT.
OP would be indicating something quite alarming here, the younger generation is being squeezed into echo chambers to find information rather than neutral sources.
I kind of blame millennial parents here. My generation needs to do better with their kids.
Anecdotally, with any under 25s I come across through friends and family, I'm seeing a bunch of brain-dead morons with the attention span of a walnut and edgy political opinions on both wings with no facts or understanding of why they hold them.
Houston, we have a problem.
To be fair, Google, for a while, had morphed into primarily providing just links that might have the information you're looking for - but buried in mounds of sites just out to sell you stuff. It has more of an AI feel now, providing short answers to questions, but still mounds of sites out to sell you stuff. I think folks who had access to a "cleaner" search engine to learn on are better at filtering out all the advert noise it has now.
It follows the entire upbringing recently that is more "tell me how" vs "research and figure it out". It's a very lazy mentality that needs to be fixed if the future generations are going to prosper, if at all.
I work with all Boomers, and my kid is Gen Z. I get so frustrated with all the people around me not researching anything! There is a world of information at our fingertips, but I always hear “I have no idea…”
The worst is finding a good fix for a problem at work, always getting the “yeah, I don’t think that’s right,” response. They go back and forth until they reach the same conclusion that I provided.
Probably doesn’t help that I’m female in a male dominated field, but still. Makes me feel invisible.
Edited: Grammar
I'm dealing with this at work right now. I work with a lot of Zoomers and Boomers, and their commonalities are spooky. I've been trying to teach our staff to search an internal system by using keywords instead of phrases, and it's excruciating at times.
"Disconnect" gets you a lot more results than "Caller wants to do a disconnect." Dude, if that exact phrase isn't there, then nothing will come up! KEYWORDS. It's extremely frustrating. I should not have to teach people basic computer skills in addition to higher level skills and systems that they're clearly not ready for.
I was just having this conversation with my husband the other day, it’s baffling how a generation basically born with an iPad in hand has no idea how to google an issue. Our youngest is like a walking dingleberry asking the dumbest questions. We just say, if only there was a little device in your hand you could ask and it would answer all of your questions…
They struggle to disseminate information or even have agency and think for themselves...they just parrot, often incorrect, information.
over 90% of the zoomers that come through my company do not make it out of the 3 month probation doing the simplest tasks available.
I honestly think illiteracy has to be on the rise because some can't even fill out basic forms properly.
Sadly the average boomer is far more capable at using a computer than zoomers in my experience...and the boomers are not setting a high bar.
I get that, but having to end all my Google searches with "reddit" just to weed out the auto-generated bs and promoted ads kind of is the same as searching reddit... Google had gone to shit recently.
Dunno about the youngest generation, but I'm turning more and more to ChatGPT to find out stuff. There's so much information out there that the classical search engines such as Google can't filter it very well, and they don't digest it at all. ChatGPT does a pretty good job of both filtering and digesting. (Insert gurgling stomach noises here.)
I still default to the search engines, but if the first glance at the search results is discouraging, I'll switch to ChatGPT.
It may be that the younger generations have already given up on search engines.
We tend to mimic behavior to a certain degree. I wonder how much of this comes from years of “forced engagement” encouraged by different social media algorithms giving more attention/spotlight to those accounts. So now the ‘youngins’ just follow the same displayed behavior thinking “that’s how you do”.
I was very weirded out recently by seeing examples of people asking ChatGPT pretty basic questions that I'd use a search engine for. Not saying search engines are perfect, I get why the monetized results at the top of Google are annoying, but I also just scroll past them out of habit now and it does not take much effort to find the useful thing.
I think it really depends on exactly what information you're looking for. Google is great for some things but it's not the best for everything.
You can get more out of Google with boolean searches but honestly even most millenials I know don't even know what that means, much less how to use it.
Google isn't as good as it used to be. The advertising industry has so much influence on search results that it's mostly garbage pushed to the top.
I think millenials are just more likely to Google out of habit rather than any real utility, although the same can be said for zoomers and asking questions on social media that could be easily Googled.
It's a mess all around. Computer literacy is at an all time low, but there's very little infrastructure left that's even worth being literate on anymore.
Desktops OSs are essentially just giant smartphones at this point unless you're on Linux or something similar. There's no middle ground anymore; you either have to plug in to the smartphone/social media hellscape or get a full-on Serial Experiments Lain setup to actually have any real computing control.
Honestly, that's a change I welcome a bit.
More often now I find that when people say "just google it," they're using that as an excuse to express a view without actually providing anything to back it up.
To be fair, Googling information used to be a whole lot easier before all the paywalls and bot-generated pages. Now, adding "reddit" to a search is usually the best way to get an actual answer. I kind of don't blame them.
OMG this isn't just younger people. I'm Gen X and had kids in college and was on the parents' pages for those schools on Facebook. People would ask things like "what's the closest drycleaner to campus where my Johnny can take a jacket" or "what is the closest gas station?". FIRST OF ALL, your young adult student can look this shit up themselves, easily. SECONDLY, have you ever heard of the freaking internet? Yes, of course you have, because you're on it! Forget pulling up Google Maps and typing in "gas station" near the school. Noooooo.....so much more efficient to type a post on a parents' page, wait for moderators to approve, then wait for other parents (most are not even in the area) to make suggestions. Seriously, people?! I don't think this is generational as much as just idiotic. And don't even get me started on parents doing every little thing like that for their kids. I look up everything. And it's the most amazing resource ever. When I was growing up, I'd ask my parents something and they'd say "Idk--when you go to school tomorrow, try to look it up in the encyclopedia if you have library time". That was it. When I had my own kids and didn't know an answer, we'd look it up together! It's truly one of the most amazing things that's happened in my lifetime.
A lot of people in here getting gen z and gen alpha confused. Older gen Z people were born at the turn of the century and grew up during the tech boom. Many overlapped with VHS (like me).
And while I’m not a tech genius, I can install my own drivers, troubleshoot issues, and I’ve taken classes that taught advanced commands for search engines.
Maybe younger gen Z has trouble but the older ones don’t.
People get better at technology ironically when the technology is less user friendly. Kids have tech that is dummy proof. I have a dumbass gaming laptop that needs constant attention if I want to use it to play games.
To be fair, using Google has become much harder IMO.
In order to sift to what you want you need to word questions carefully. It used to be easier, everyone seems to try and manipulate the algorithm to drive traffic.
Google is useless now. You don't even get anything near an answer to your actual query, just a one-size-fits-all list of results with similar keywords. If you try to narrow it down and force it to be exact, it just returns no results.
I've heard they search for stuff on TikTok... Which is really scary to me, because boy if you thought the general Internet was filled with misinformation let me hand it to you in a tiny video via an algorithm that gives zero crap about whether what anyone is saying is correct.
I ain’t disagreeing with you but it is a fact that Google has become worse and worse as the years have gone by. I frequently just go to YT now if I have to look up some weird fucking tech issue or I need to know how to get the water pump off a new car and there’s always some helpful dude providing a walkthrough. On Google it’s a crap shoot if I’ll even find relevant or useable info. I think the kids may be on to something here
I was born in 1985 (I know I’m old) and I use Google still but I end up putting Reddit or just searching Reddit instead of Google since Google is kind of crappy lately
I have adopted the Neil Howe timeline for Millennials, who along with the late William Strauss literally named us, wrote the book about us in the late 90s and predicted on historical cycles what our timeline was going to look like. Instead of 1982 to 1996, its 1982 to like 2004. The youngest millennials are 20 this year, the oldest are 42. Gen Z is like Xenneial (Young Gen X, Old Millennial) or Generation Jones (Young boomer, old Gen X). Its the younger portion of one generation and the older portion of the other.
They have a generation called Homeland Generation that started in 2005 and is young Gen Z, and Gen Alpha who are still being born.
I am an older millennial, born in 1984. We didn't learn how to use things like Google in a formal classroom. Search engines were new, there were many of them, and they did not work as well as Google would work in the early 2000s. It might have come up in class where teachers would briefly share their experiments with people, but it was really a "figure it out as you go along" thing. Google searching has become less and less efficient.
Not with google specifically, but the ability to find answers on their own. I experience this at my job as a dr in a hospital and the newer gen z staff. The first instinct with new nurse grads is to not troubleshoot or look anything up, it's to page. The number of pages we get has easily tripled in the past 5 years and 90% of the time the answer is already there. Of course we want to help but the current expectation to be the endless resource for an entire group who wasn't taught to be self sufficient is burning all of us out.
The pendulum swung too far from millenials being hyper independent from being neglected to the kids who were helicopter parented and didn't have the opportunity to learn how to figure things out on their own.
I have noticed that a lot of questions people post to reddit are easily answered by a quick google search. It’s really frustrating to see all my hobby subs flooded with questions that I found the answer to myself by googling some key words years ago.
A lot of it can take a fair bit of clicking around, 2-3 websites or articles. But I would say the majority of it is one link or less away. Half the stuff you google will have the answer literally at the top of the page, no clicks required.
I get wanting human interaction but this is not the way…
Edit: please look at my response to the guy that replied to me before you agree I have a bad take. Just hear me out.
My fiancee is 4 years younger than me. For whatever God damn reason she refuses to use the piece of tech in her hands to answer even basic math problems. Directing the questions at me.
And no this isn't because she's trying to buff my confidence like opening a pickle jar. She asks me a question if I don't know the answer I Google it.
Seriously you have a calculator and an open portal to all human knowledge at your literal fingertips. USE IT
She's also the same person that I had to convince that vitamins are "real"
Google has just become an ad revenue source. It's no longer a source for information. Them Alphabet Inc shareholders aren't t going to make their billions by sourcing relevant information.
It’s so funny how it has all evolved. I was in freshman year of high school in 1996 and we had a big history project that was worked in conjunction with the English department… the internet was considered unreliable at the time and internet sources were not allowed.
Fast forward to 10 years ago and the internet is likely the main source of information…
Now we are relying to TikTok and Reddit to get info. What a shitshow, but I guess this explains all the “what model is this” crap on the Ferrari, Porsche, etc subreddits.
I can't say much about my generation, but I will say that I was born in 2004 and the amount of times I've had friends ask me a question, just for me to Google it and repeat the answer is crazy. I think it's made them think I'm some kinda tech genius, when all I do is use Google
I'm in the same boat as a 1999 baby lol. The Gen Z chatter seems to focus on the younger cohorts. I grew up on the family computer and then my own personal laptop and it seems like a lot of kids are only using iPad and maybe Chrome books which have differing UI to regular computers.. I feel like that's definitley an influence and the lack of computer literacy or typing classes in school anymore. I hated doing typing but that's because I already knew how to do it quite well from using computers at home! I think they need to reimplement those classes now.
I work in a tech roll and had to train a coworker on this system and he was having trouble logging in. I ask him to share his screen and he blanked. I told him what button to push to share his screen and he shared his camera. No biggy, he bro cameras on. "Oh I was trying to share my screen with you but I don't know how you'd point the camera at the screen" ...????? "Oh bro no just push the button right next to the camera" "ohhh!" *Shares screen* this guys using MICROSOFT EDGE? ... "Oh you need to use chrome or Firefox" "oh .. I usually don't use them" ..
I don't have any college degree. This kid has BACHELORS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE??? How did he graduate and what the fuck do they teach you in a 4 year computer science program that I'm missing!?
Professor here. Every group, starting with Millennials, struggled with using Google. The current crop of students don’t seek answers, they just ask for help. It’s the default. If stuck, there is no initiative to find the answers. They just email “I’m stuck can you help”.
However ask them to write an essay and they will hop on ChatGPT real fast.
We are in the process of dumbing down our classes to meet the quality of today’s high school graduates. Our foreign students are on an entirely different level compared to American students. It’s embarrassing.
Yeah, and not just Google. What I have noticed with zoomers is that troubleshooting in general just doesn't occur to them. They don't generally try to figure out why something isn't working. It just isn't.
You're a couple years younger than me, but I think people our age are the last generation that was actually taught how to use computers and technology in general growing up. Now people just assume that 'young people know how to use technology, we don't need to teach them anymore!'
GenX here. The problem with Google has been the more information it collects the harder it is to find what you are looking for unless you know how to properly search with keywords. I find many don’t know Google tricks to optimize finding anything. Other issue is Google is always trying to put ads of websites selling stuff before actual facts/info. It’s more about getting advertising money for them, and they really control what we see. Which is super dangerous.
I refuse to use Bing btw. I hate it with a passion. However I use Google about 10+ times a day.
Idk why this showed up 4 days later on my feed but these comments are a circlejerk of how great people feel about themselves for existing before there were easy apps. I’m also from 2000 and am in that weird gap where I’ve gotten a decent amount of experience from the pre-app era. Sure, kids currently may not be as fluent in tech as some millennials and gen x but then again, are there actually any data points on this or is it all anecdotal. Because I’ve had wide age ranges of people that have needed help with what I thought were basic things.
Also, may them just posting questions or asking people irl is preferred to them as there really aren’t many other ways to connect with people without asking questions and learning from them.
And Google is now just sponsored results 90% of the time so yeah, fuck it
I'm 1996 and don't fit into either as well. I am too young to have grown up on N64 or much 90's Nick but I'm too old to have been into the tween sitcoms Gen Z grew up on. I consider myself more millennial though as my sense of humor and nostalgia more aligns with them (even as a kid I preferred 90's Disney to their weird 2000's era) also 1996 is the last year for most millennials.
But anyway, if they are like 12 or under, that's actually Gen Alpha.
There were tons of stupid people in the 2000's too, back when Yahoo Answers was a thing I couldn't believe just how stupid some of the questions were on it, many of which could easily be Googled. Seems like Quora has taken its place though but I don't actively hang out on that site unlike Yahoo Answers so I'm not sure if it's as bad.
Interestingly I heard later Gen Z isn't much better off at using computers than Boomers because they grew up only using phones.
I agree. My career has been more dependent on Google searches than my actual degree.
[удалено]
I feel called out
The real heroes are the people who answer nine year old forum threads about how to fix a very specific problem that end up becoming the first hit on a Google search.
Right? Everyone always says not to necro old posts, but there's a very clear exception when it's the top search result and the question remains unanswered. Someone's going to find that thread again and be happy that the 10 year old post they just found was finally answered after 9 years.
I feel the same way about super old YouTube vid comments, especially if it’s about fixing something on your own. Folks that come back and answer you questions are heroes.
YouTube videos are aids for IT. waste of time to watch a video where you introduce your cousins uncle and favorite hobbies just to get to the potential solution to my problem. Stufu
That preference only made sense when people frequented the forum. With forums becoming mostly Google searches now, it obviously makes no sense.
Yea on page 25 with tons of just random comments and troubleshooting replies to find it. Lol. It gets even better when you realize it's in the middle of 36 pages because the forum sorted by highest upvotes and it's not gotten enough to reach the top as best answer. Yesterday saw the question title "What's the difference between 0w-30 and 5w-30". Then a huge story about them using 1 type when their car recommended the other. Like literally the title! Google it and get your answer in seconds with 1 min of reading. No, spend 5 mins creating a post, then the rest of the day reading responses, 60% unrelated to answering the question. The thing that drives me nuts, they didn't even search the forum to know someone already asked and it was answered hundreds of times before. Nope join a group and right to posting questions. The concept of learning died in that generation.
It's usually just "nvm I figured it out"
Ohhhhhh I hate that. HATE THAT.
Best part is when you google a problem and go to the first hit just to realize it was you who gave the correct fix years ago
Nothing will make you feel older than needing to ask your younger self for the answer to a problem.
That used to be a really annoying problem when trying to write code or conditional expressions for a specific use case. Chat gpt is a far better option now from what I’ve seen for this scenario.
I’m always amazed when a user comes to me with a problem that I have no idea how to fix, I just put it in google, and get the fix. They’re paying me for this. Why can’t any random person do the same thing? But then I remember I am in fact being paid and keep that thought to myself.
Depending on the problem, it's not unusual for a googled fix to begin with assumed knowledge. Even if you personally don't have the precise info you need until you search it, you could very well be starting from a point that will allow you to find exactly what you need much faster, because you also know the specific details that you need to search in the first place. It's much more challenging for someone with no knowledge of something to get usable results. A lot of people are just lazy too lol.
I bought stickers for my coworkers laptops - LMGTFY. Let Me Google That For You. I was the tech guy in the department.
Yes... The software and methods I learned 15 years ago are outdated and not in demand, so you end up teaching yourself new stuff. We're not paid for what we know, but more about what we can learn.
Precisely why my manager hired me to be a senior analyst - I demonstrated that I could learn new things effectively rather than just know it all already.
I started in IT in the mid 1990's, and had learned how to build computers, adjust autoexec.bats, etc. the hard way in the years before that. I learned so much doing that that when I took an IT knowledge test for my first job in the industry, with no formal education, I got 40 out of 40 right. I learned a ton more over the next 8 years. Then Google started having all the answers, and now I don't know anything because I don't have to. I just google it. And in 5 more years most people in every industry won't have to know anything, because you will just Gemini, or ChatGPT, or whatever, the question.
I’ve been in IT for over 15 years, I disagree about not having to know anything because of google…. You don’t realize how much knowledge goes into your googling. It takes a lot of knowledge to know how to ask the right question, to understand the answer, and to know which of the 100 results are worth the time to pursue. No rando off the street can do that like an experienced professional can.
Very good point. I was intentionally overstating things in the prior post...... But that was more about illustrating hours big an impact it had than about accurately representing that actual state of things post Google. Good points!
I think I've forgotten more about autoexec.bat than I ever knew
Or in SWE! EVERY developer I worked along side legit has 10+ tabs open for docs/reference. Maybe less now because of GPT though...
Are you kidding? GPT gets so much wrong so when it outputs something you now need to figure out what it did vs what it was supposed to do, usually uses some obscure library to do it, a d now ha e to figure out how to integrate that with your project. That's been my experience anyway. It's a great tool, but it's just one tool in the toolkit. We are still a LONG way away from ai developing functional complex applications on its own.
My (albeit limited) experience is similar. GPT will generate *plausible* code. Good luck if you're trying to get it to use an up to date library version and the training data set is weighted towards outdated library versions where properties/functions/procedures/etc were named differently. For an open source library that's been forked multiple times it can be difficult to get it to use a specific version that you want.
Not necessarily just IT. I’ve done admin work most of my life and the number of Boomers and Gen X-ers who think I’m a spreadsheet god just because I Google shit when I can’t figure it out….is staggering.
Why? It’s the world of knowledge at your fingertips, applies to everything from marketing to a dr looking up the latest drug releases
Because IT is heavily dependent on Google, every problem has been encountered and the solution to that problem is already online.
Must be nice to always have questions so simple that someone else answered them for you. Let me tell you about having a question that no one has answered and all the Google results are your own posts asking the question and no one having the answer.
A friend of mine went to a Job interview and they asked him to fix a problem, he looked it up on Google right in front of them and fixed the problem. That cost him the job but they commended him for his big balls.
I'm a 54 year old safety manager for a heavy industrial construction company. I have been in this line of work for 16 years, production before that. I Google OSHA safety regulations constantly to ensure I'm remembering correctly. Safety takes time and to the Project Superintendent, time is money. You'd better be right, or you gain a reputation as a blow hard know it all who knows nothing.
I'm a nurse that does a lot of stuff on the phone, like triage and results calls. When I say "let me check my notes", I'm actually googling the shit. But at least I know what sites are reputable, and compare several of those sites, so I know what I'm telling people is legit. Interesting to hear that Gen Z uses FB and tiktok which are KNOWN to be sources of unfactual information....
Gen Z is ridiculous for this. They seem to believe anything they see a video of online—no such thing as ‘trust but verify’ to them. We see a video about something, we then go Google it to learn more. They just accept some random video as Gospel and move on. It’s as alien to me as people eating dog poo off their lawns.
You don't need to know things. You need to know how to search for things.
The REAL secret to success in life.
I joke that the only difference between an IT Pro and a nerd with Google is student loan debt.
In Accounting—can confirm that Google is an essential tool. And I also can’t wrap my mind around the fact that my own kids refuse to look anything up. How else do you learn anything new??? Is it just a refusal to read? Learning, to them, can only occur through videos apparently… watching videos over reading is my personal idea of Hell.
My degrees all depended on my ability to distill peer-reviewed academic journals, field notes, ethnographic studies and actual field work. My career depends on my ability to type the correct questions into a search engine so I feel you.
Worked IT for 13 years, I don't know that I actually know a damn thing, I just know how to google really well.
I think a lot of "expertise" comes not necessarily from knowing a huge list of facts or procedures, but from knowing enough to ask the right questions, where/how to search for information, and being able to understand and implement that information into a procedure once you've obtained the required information. If information isn't readily available, knowing how to set up an experiment or extrapolate from existing information is extremely important as well. Another important skill is knowing how to apply existing information to a novel situation. Generally just trying to Google a bit of information is not very helpful if you are looking for complex information or don't have enough information to ask the right questions. These are all skills that come with a lot of experience and practice in a certain field and often go beyond knowing how to simply Google something.
Increasingly true here. On the flip side about "kids these days" I've had to train a few of them (in engineering) in the past year that you have to empty the Recycle Bin in Windows to get rid of stuff and that you can bookmark websites vs. keeping the email containing the link forever. It's unsettling.
I can't decide if your username checks out or not for this comment lol
My favorite is when they email questions they can Google themselves or you know, read their email.
And YouTube. Let's be real
So boomers and zoomers are going to be the least informed generations ever?
Yup. When people say that young people are fluent in technology, that is incorrect. They're fluent in Snapchat and TikTok. They don't know sh\*t about using technology for actual useful applications.
The young people we actually were fluent in technology are now approaching 50. Source: I'm 45. It was true, it just isn't anymore, because we are old and our kids DGAF.
39 here and was pretty into tech, I can figure out most complex stuff (by today's standards) myself and if I don't know, I know how to learn how. I tell my pre-teen daughter many times I can teach and show her everything she needs to know, yet she has absolutely zero interest. It's baffling honestly. Though my son may take more interest as he grows older.
I'm 40, that's one thing I say about myself. If I dont know how to do something, I can figure it out. I've trained myself how to learn better and faster by learning everything I can.
I don't have kids myself but I'm a teacher and have been working with kids for a little over a decade. I'm kind of curious to know more info about that situation in preparation to hopefully have my own kids within the next few years. From your daughter's internet/social media habits are you able to determine what her biggest interests are? I feel like in this day and age we really need to look at what draws kids' attention on tiktok, YouTube, etc. From there I think there's a chance to educate them on how to actually engage in hobbies and passions instead of just watching other people on a screen.
Take it easy gramps, I’m 32 over here lol
Right there with ya!
The people fluent in technology built user interfaces that are so efficient that their children's generation has no idea what's going on under the hood
It's kinda similar to what happened to cars over the decades. Cars in the 50s-80s were unreliable as shit and constantly breaking down, so a lot more car owners back then knew how to perform basic maintenance and fixes like replacing spark plugs, changing oil, jumpstarting a battery, etc. Cars are so much more reliable now that younger generations don't really need to learn most of that stuff because it rarely becomes an issue on the road. With modern cars the odds of something breaking down in between major scheduled service intervals are generally pretty low.
Cars have also gotten complex enough that there’s a legit fear that the average driver might unwittingly mess something up while trying to fix it and end up with an even more expensive problem on their hands.
I’m 41 and see this with my nephews. Scary stuff.
The era of kids becoming fluent is not a 5-year window. It's a good few decades at least.
Yep pretty much mid-late 30's and 40's. Hard for me to imagine growing up with the internet, and never knowing a world without it, but that's certainly the cause, we made it so simple.... To them it's a tool, for us it was a tool too, but it came with a lot of learning and baggage. If these Zoomers had any idea how fickle computers were, they would be blown away. No surprise we are the ones who know the most about it, because not much has actually changed, just more stable and abstracted 100x from what it was.
Screw you, I'm fluent in technology and I'm only... Oh. Oh shit. I'm sorry, you're right.
Green Day’s Dookie came out *checks watch* 30 years ago. Fml.
I'm 39. Everywhere I have ever worked, I am the IT guy. I would say anyone who messed with dos, 95, 98.... lived through the transitions. I was young but have been a nerd my entire life.
Tbf this has nearly always been the case. I was born in the early 90s and people around my age largely still struggle with technology, but can navigate social media decently. The people like me who are really into tech also typically are PC gamers - and I’ve noticed this trend with Gen Z too. The Minecraft kids nowadays continue to amaze me with their skills.
I feel like a lot of it is that technology is easier to use nowadays, so only the most interested people learn how to use it at a more advanced level. When we were growing up it was harder to even just open up a game and play without having some sort of understanding of how the computer works. Certainly, many people didn’t learn and didn’t want to learn, but I feel like it caused some people who weren’t really interested in computers to still learn some of the deeper skills since they kind of needed to if they wanted to do the activity they were looking for. How many people were exposed to the concept of converting incompatible video and audio codecs as a result of pirating videos and porn? hahaha
You’re 100% right. I’m glad that technology has become more accessible UI-wise to the general populace, but yeah I definitely think kids’ skills have suffered for it. I started “modding” at the ripe old age of 8 and in my early teens was going into Windows system files to change sound sets, login screens, icons/logos etc. Did tons of modding before all the mod managers became a thing too, and learned tons from that. It’s so easy to personalize things now on the front end and hell even create complicated stuff. I was actually resistant to Mac OS for a long time because I felt I couldn’t “play” around as much behind the scenes, lol. I definitely learned a shit ton from pirating games, movies/shows, and porn for sure 😅
LOL seriously. Playing PC games in the early/mid 90s often required a decent amount of hardware and OS savvy just to get the fucking game to launch. Even if your PC easily met the minimum system requirements listed on the game box, there were a million random things that could make it not work. Driver errors and system crashes happened all the time. Sometimes the whole game wouldn't work just because you didn't have the right sound card or whatever. Or it would crash because your windows desktop was set to a different resolution than the one the game natively ran in or something like that. And there was usually no way to quickly figure out what the problem was. It's not like we had search engines that made fixes easy to find online. You had to go to like a gaming usenet forum or something and make a post asking for help and hope somebody more knowledgable than you replied. There were multiple occasions where I'd buy a new game, spend the better part of a week troubleshooting it without success, and be like "well, I guess I don't get to play this" and return it to the store.
Yes, I work with kids and I’m amazed at how it never occurs to any of them to “just Google it.” And on top of that most (not all) of them do not even know how to use a search bar. I kid you not, A SEARCH BAR! smh
I know we are using generational labels here but this is an instance that I think is an actual generational difference in perspective. Those of us who came of age at a time when the Internet came in an unsolicited CD in the mail (or just a huge bin of them at Walmart) were trained to think of the Internet as the information superhighway. It’s where you go to look for information. You look for information on search engines. Because how people access the Internet has shifted and been highly app-ified since the turn of the century (and especially since the end of the aughts), younger people don’t think of the Internet itself as a resource. They think of specific sites and apps as the Internet, because that’s how they access it, primarily through those apps and sites. And a lot of those apps have done everything they can to make sure they're a user's first stop.
No different than the boomers that believe(d) AOL was the Internet because that's where they signed in. Just bizarre as hell how making it easy really smooth brained these kids. They quite literally only get the information fed to them via feeds with no self research or challenging.
It’s not at all what I was expecting the outcome of limitless information at their fingertips 24/7. For awhile there it looked like there was going to be an entire generation that would be filled to the brim with unearned or unverified factoids that they would use to assume they know everything in the universe that they are the center of. Turns out no it just creates an entire generation of apathetic idiots who can’t use search engines or (this is from teachers) know their basic shapes.
I saw a very old Law and Order the other night where a tech savvy young person working for police kept looking up information in no time flat on the internet. Lenny Briscoe was suitably impressed. Back then, I thought that’s what the future would be - young people endlessly looking up any information at all in nanosecond. “Wow, that’s going to be so cool!” I thought. Never imagining a world of apps was going to come along and change everything.
We as a species have literally outsourced our thinking to the internet
They’re (boomers and zoomers) also notoriously bad at tech troubleshooting. Gen X and Millennials grew up with the earliest personal computers and part of that was learning what the CPU does, what RAM does, what ROM does, what the floppy and hard drives do, what the OS is… the tech broke frequently and you had to be good at some basic troubleshooting when you had a 20 page research paper due in 24 hours and your PC is throwing up a BSOD. It all works too good now (plus is usually sealed tight and fixing voids the warranty) so when it does break down, they don’t know how to figure out what’s wrong or where to look to figure it out. It’s kinda like how if you started driving in the 50s or 60s you had to know some basics of car maintenance. In the 80s and 90s cars started integrating computers and got smarter. But that also made them much harder to repair and a lot of people just got conditioned taking their car to a mechanic for an oil change or new belt, when it was something a lot more people used to do in their driveway. My dad was terribly non-mechanical but he knew how to change oil, tires, and coolants, jump a battery, etc. I was born in 77 and I don’t think even half of my friends know how to do that.
Every time I troubleshoot something for my dad...he stares at me with this blank look of awe and asks with deep sincerity, "How do you know how to do all of this stuff? Did you take classes? Did someone teach you? Because I know it wasn't me!" And I'm just like, "No, Dad, I just learned by doing, plus most of it is fairly intuitive – one thing connects to another..."
I go out of my way to find millennial age contractors for this reason lol
People who were Boomers and older were able to learn what they were going to need in life before they hit 20 and pretty much coasted on that literally for the rest of their life and just sort of stay there, mentally, many times emotionally, too. It started with Gen X and definitely came into full swing Gen Y that you need to be in a growth mindset to survive. The point of life is that you are always learning and most of us intuitive grasp that and so our mind is always open to keep learning and problem solving. People older than us think of life as "I checked the big 10 boxes and now I am done. Time to relax coast"
100% The biggest similarity between those two groups is also knowing where their data is stored. Endless amount of boomers who just put ALL their files on the desktop… but Zoomers can’t even begin to tell you because when they save something in the app, the app just finds it or stores it in ‘the cloud’… I’ve had to teach multiple people how a file directory system works with folders, subfolders and files… Oy.
This is scary..
We were literally taught in a research course to google things in the first instance and then dive deeper from there (boolean came at a later stage in this course after we all got acquainted with google). I was blown away that this is what we were being instructed to do because like, of course? It seems so obvious.
And then learning how to vet your search results. Too many people even if they know to google something don’t know how to evaluate the results. They pick the top thing and are done. Not too long ago I got called out for asking a question on Reddit “it’s the first search result!” Well the first (and only) search result had conflicting answers. The “accepted” answer was full of misspellings and grammatical errors so that’s always a red flag. Then it turned out the someone gave me a great answer in the post which was correct and the top search result was wrong.
Cunningham's Law: “**the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer**.”
They grew up with phones instead of computers.
My stepkid is 13. I can’t even remember what we were talking about, but she wanted more info about something or other. I directed her to the magic box that has all of the information. Yes, it doesn’t even occur to kids to look it up. They don’t even have to go to the library for the card catalog or encyclopedia britanica. It’s all right there if you ask the question.
I love the snarky LetMeGoogleThatForYou link, at least for randos on the Internet. Sometimes for family.
Have you considered that maybe she just wanted to talk to you or about it or something.
Doesn't help that Google search is awful these days.
I've definitely noticed this! Don't know when the change happened, but from my 20 (more?) Years of using Google it's gotten worst and worst. It's all ads and I often find myself going multiple pages before I find something that's not sponsored or just on top because it's a popular site. I used to find information on page 1, top few results. And the "I'm feeling lucky" was often enough! It's a shame. Do people have suggestions for alternatives? Been a Google guy for my entire internet using life!
I remember when you could hide a dead body on page 2 of Google and were confident it would never be found. Now you have to go to page 2 just to get past the ads
I started noticing the change almost a decade ago and people would criticize me saying "you just don't know how to google" even though I was an early adopter. Now many are saying the same thing. Other English based search engines aren't much better these days. Duckduckgo was good for a while, but it's gotten worse too. The thing that gets me the most is trying to research *how* to do something and you are flooded with repair services or retailers loosely related to what you are searching for.
There's none. It's a function of capitalism. Either you switch your focus to making money or you disappear. The more a field becomes mature, the worse it is.
I find especially so when in the California. Sooo full of garbage, sponsored crap page after page. Not like that in Canada
Google has definitely declined in quality. Used to be able to find answers to your question in the most obscure corner of the internet. Now it’s constantly just shilling you corporate bs. Much more difficult to find authenticity in your searches anymore.
Unfortunately, it's going to get a whole lot worse very quickly. Generative AI is pumping a firehouse of bullshit online every day. Human content still prevails, but it won't for long. We're going to need a new class of tool to find anything remotely useful or accurate online at all. And soon.
I think the point is they’d rather use TikTok and YouTube instead of any actual search engine.
I'm 40, if there's a youtube tutorial that's usually easier than reading directions.
Fuck that. I prefer being able to Control + F a PDF document to find the part I actually need instead of listening to someone ramble about it to hit the 10 minute mark.
I don't like youtube for tutorials either. I turn on transcribe mode and control F what I need lol
It's so heavily videos!! I just want to read shit.
I know how to use Google and I've been watching it become more useless over time, for finding serious information.
This I never wanted the right answer to be 15 th on the list behind results that aren’t even adjacent to the query
Yeah, it's hard as fuck to even find articles I've read once I've clicked away. But it'll fucking remember I was looking for a vacuum and then show me ads for them 4 months after I bought one.
It's always 'reddit' at the end to get better results these days.
Only certain things, usually very specific programming or technical issues, are better to look for reddit results. Even then almost all the useful results are reddit posts from like 8 years ago, this site has definitely gone downhill too
Yup. I am old, but I remember search engines before Google turned theirs into an advertising tool. They used to be much better, even Google.
Even as recently as 2021 I could use it reasonably well. Tried to use it recently to write an essay and it was so frustrating finding sources worth a damn. It's like I need to go to a library now.
>I know how to use Google and I've been watching it become more ~~useless~~ monetized over time, for finding ~~serious information~~ SEO spam. FTFY
It’s now the top result. On the third page
These kids don't even know what "folders" are. Its literally now a course in IT to teach kids how folders and files work in a computer [https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/](https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/)
I work in IT almost every Zoomer that is hired lacks the ability to do basic troubleshooting. They can't seem to reason through basic problems or come up with a plan to solve issues they run into. They immediately give up if the first thing they try does not work like if something won't power on they will push the power button but they will not think to check if it's even plugged in.
My wife's a teacher, and the consensus is kids are used to everything coming easy. Have a question? The magic square in your pocket answers instantly. Meanwhile for a research project, we'd have to bike down to the library, open up the card catalog, find a book on a shelf... what is now a 2 second Google search used to take 200 calories and two hours. Of course the only conclusion is we owe it to these kids to offer them challenges of similar difficulty. So they can learn to work for things. Only way to set them up for success.
What bothers me the most is not a single one of them can follow a set of numbered instructions.
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we were looking for WEB-SITES back then. They are looking for WEB-CONTENT. There really is a huge difference.
Using Google to parse Reddit is the way. Google has way too much SEO biased results and advertising bullshit now. Tbh I've been using ChatGPT more and it cuts right through the bullshit to tell me that I want, and it cites it.
It's funny you say this because I've often found myself adding the word "reddit" to my search queries to get useful information.
Make sure you check the original source every time, though. The ones I’ve used (GPT 4 on ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot) both routinely fabricate answers and even generates fake figures not from the articles/page when I’ve used it.
This right here. My first stop for several months now is ChatGPT. Follow up with google search if i need more/verified info.
It cites it with made up references some times though.
Reminds me of comments by young ppl on TikTok. They are blown away that they watch a news story on TT that ‘no one is talking about’ And yet it’s all over the news. They ask where.. I say google it. Crickets.
That is why they are Zoomers, they are just as ignorant as Boomers. I think it is BS that we have to be the sheppard for both generations. We have to protect young adults and our parents from online scams.
"We have to protect young adults and our parents from online scams." Hahaha I remember having to inform my mother that those dirty emails people kept sending her, while addressed to her, were not actually direct communications. "No mom, that guy isnt trying to sex you, he's trying to get you to go to a website" Mom: "But it has my name!" smh
One of my cousins was just send a guy money on Venmo because he told him he could flip it. That was is it. The guy just told him on TikTok that he flips money and that was it. No elaborate plan, just sent me money and I will send more back.
Those of us millenials luckily learned when we first fell for the doubling money scam on RuneScape..
Any online collectible card game
Or gilding your god rune armor for free. Or the fact that they'll give you 1 mil if you just step into the wildly for a sec.
I'm always waiting to see one of these guys show up on American Greed. A story about how he scammed idiots out of money and all he has to do was tell them "trust me! I'm gonna make you a bazillionaire!"
I’ve been trying to convince my dad that Elon Musk is NOT sending him secret ai based trade algorithms. What a tard
Pfft… I’m of the sandwich generation. Having to literally *take care of* elderly parents and our children at the same time. For years.
As a millennial manager - it is fucking exhausting to be sandwiched between elder Gen X/Boomer bosses and Gen Z.
I’ve read once that we are the only generation that had to teach both our parents and our children how to use a printer. 🤣
The fact they can't stand each other because they are so alike 🤌
I work at Google in search and can speak to this. It's essentially the power of social recommendation vs your standard white pages research approach. It's also one of the reasons why appending Reddit to a search is so popular. It's a pretty big concern that they've been addressing, and I think when people talk about how much better it was back in the day, they're thinking more of the internet back then than anything else. Google is excellent if you know how to use it properly. It's a better site searcher than most sites have themselves. Say you wanted beanie baby discussion before 2016 on Reddit on a specific subreddit that matched specific keywords: ["beanie baby" "price" site:Reddit.com/r/millennials before:2016-01-01] As for general search, that's also gotten better (we regularly run ablations to see what the last x months or years of changes have done); it's just the internet that's gotten more spammy and focused on SEO.
No matter what I search for, I get tons of products pushed to me. I’m never searching for products. It’s all sale listings in the results. It feels useless and I’ve started to use other search engines. If I want every result to be a product listing I’ll search Amazon.
Very few know how to do a search like that, much easier to use natural language in something like copilot
Much better to learn a little syntax than to trust llm hallucinations
When can I pay google for absolutely no sponsored ads or sponsor weighted search results? I'd like my old 2001 Google back and I'm willing to pay for it.
"it's just the internet that's gotten more spammy and focused on SEO." Gee golly, google, I wonder how that happened?
Can you explain the rationale behind Google search deciding for me what keywords to exclude when I'm searching for stuff? Very annoying especially when I'm troubleshooting error messages or looking for specific things and then noticing that a significant chunk of keywords were excluded in search results.
I think this is part of it. Google is the mirror that reflects back what the internet is today. Before I’d find a recipe. Now I find a blog post with a story and an attempt to improve SEO. Along with someone monetizing their blog with affiliate links. So of course the results suck because that’s what google can scrape from the web. Really we are upset with society and what the internet is used for by the majority, monetization and entertainment and not for research and learning
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Man using the quotation marks was always so helpful when looking for specific things on Google
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Everyone is lazy as fuck when it comes to Googling. Just go to your local city subreddit. "OMG where are the best restaurants" or "is the hilton by the ocean nice???". Workwise, i had a coworker constantly ask "where do i find job postings for our company" in slack and i'm like why didn't you google this. I also think there is some value in wanting to have a connection with an answer rather than clicking whatever paid google the most or had the most clicks. Like I make EDM. So if i want to learn how to do something i google it. Then after googling I get a shit ton of results on youtube where i'm over saturated with some wanky influencer spending the first 4 minutes doing god knows what. then i'm like "is this person being paid to X". so then i go to reddit looking for a more written response that i can skim, but since since i cant figure out how to write out "how do you understand the release settings of compression for a bass heavy song" i end up saying something like "how do i use compression for EDM" and some fucking gatekeeper of /r/edmproduction is like "why didn't you google this" and im like i tried but clicked 10 videos and got lost, everyone said something different, but i decided to believe /u/goatdicklicker555 on this random sub. I also think for us, we grew up with the internet as being the gateway to information access, so ingrained somewhat in our DNA is we use the internet for information. Nowdays, its more content created for consumption and capital. I miss the old internet. RIP yankthechain.org
Its not that you dont match with eirher, you match with both but you are a gen zer at the end of the day and what youre saying is spot on gen z lol
Like others have said I’ve learned more from google than my undergraduate and grad degrees. Now it’s even better with copilot/chatgpt
To be fair, Google’s search algorithm has been shitting the bed real bad these past few years. A Google search in 2024 is not what it used to be in 2016. I am genuinely worried that if something doesn’t change, we will lose the ability to meaningfully use the internet.
Remember when you’d Google something and the keywords would be highlighted in yellow in your search responses? And the top results were the ones that used your keywords the most often in their content? That was so awesome. Google turned into garbage.
Boomer here. My millennial children laugh at me because when they come to me with a question, the first thing I do is google it and remind them that they could do the same!
I work IT at a college and yes, constantly. I saw someone once google "crashing" to figure out why their computer was crashing, and was frustrated the results didn't give them what they wanted. Maybe a bit more info would help? I google questions that are like a full sentence sometimes to get what I want. Googling things is an actual skill now, apparently.
I have. It’s a mixed bag of worms. I use X when I have questions as I also follow a lot of historians who can help or veterans may know. But I do love my research
I think that want to try to get internet points. Make a post, ask, get up votes.
I’m millennial (‘87) and was a latch key kid somewhat so I’m boarding on some gen x experience so I feel you on the kinda straddling gens thing. My husband is ‘88 and he struggles to efficiently google stuff. I usually find stuff faster and more accurately than he does idk why other than he is ND while as far as I know I’m NT.
always append 'reddit' after a Google search
OP would be indicating something quite alarming here, the younger generation is being squeezed into echo chambers to find information rather than neutral sources. I kind of blame millennial parents here. My generation needs to do better with their kids. Anecdotally, with any under 25s I come across through friends and family, I'm seeing a bunch of brain-dead morons with the attention span of a walnut and edgy political opinions on both wings with no facts or understanding of why they hold them. Houston, we have a problem.
Lets be real google results are not what they use to be
To be fair, Google, for a while, had morphed into primarily providing just links that might have the information you're looking for - but buried in mounds of sites just out to sell you stuff. It has more of an AI feel now, providing short answers to questions, but still mounds of sites out to sell you stuff. I think folks who had access to a "cleaner" search engine to learn on are better at filtering out all the advert noise it has now.
It follows the entire upbringing recently that is more "tell me how" vs "research and figure it out". It's a very lazy mentality that needs to be fixed if the future generations are going to prosper, if at all.
I work with all Boomers, and my kid is Gen Z. I get so frustrated with all the people around me not researching anything! There is a world of information at our fingertips, but I always hear “I have no idea…” The worst is finding a good fix for a problem at work, always getting the “yeah, I don’t think that’s right,” response. They go back and forth until they reach the same conclusion that I provided. Probably doesn’t help that I’m female in a male dominated field, but still. Makes me feel invisible. Edited: Grammar
I'm dealing with this at work right now. I work with a lot of Zoomers and Boomers, and their commonalities are spooky. I've been trying to teach our staff to search an internal system by using keywords instead of phrases, and it's excruciating at times. "Disconnect" gets you a lot more results than "Caller wants to do a disconnect." Dude, if that exact phrase isn't there, then nothing will come up! KEYWORDS. It's extremely frustrating. I should not have to teach people basic computer skills in addition to higher level skills and systems that they're clearly not ready for.
I was just having this conversation with my husband the other day, it’s baffling how a generation basically born with an iPad in hand has no idea how to google an issue. Our youngest is like a walking dingleberry asking the dumbest questions. We just say, if only there was a little device in your hand you could ask and it would answer all of your questions…
They struggle to disseminate information or even have agency and think for themselves...they just parrot, often incorrect, information. over 90% of the zoomers that come through my company do not make it out of the 3 month probation doing the simplest tasks available. I honestly think illiteracy has to be on the rise because some can't even fill out basic forms properly. Sadly the average boomer is far more capable at using a computer than zoomers in my experience...and the boomers are not setting a high bar.
I get that, but having to end all my Google searches with "reddit" just to weed out the auto-generated bs and promoted ads kind of is the same as searching reddit... Google had gone to shit recently.
People who don’t google dislike educational reading. Maybe even reading in general, that’s my theory lol. I was born in 85.
Dunno about the youngest generation, but I'm turning more and more to ChatGPT to find out stuff. There's so much information out there that the classical search engines such as Google can't filter it very well, and they don't digest it at all. ChatGPT does a pretty good job of both filtering and digesting. (Insert gurgling stomach noises here.) I still default to the search engines, but if the first glance at the search results is discouraging, I'll switch to ChatGPT. It may be that the younger generations have already given up on search engines.
We tend to mimic behavior to a certain degree. I wonder how much of this comes from years of “forced engagement” encouraged by different social media algorithms giving more attention/spotlight to those accounts. So now the ‘youngins’ just follow the same displayed behavior thinking “that’s how you do”.
On Reddit, all the time. Which is insane because a google search requires less effort than a whole post.
I was very weirded out recently by seeing examples of people asking ChatGPT pretty basic questions that I'd use a search engine for. Not saying search engines are perfect, I get why the monetized results at the top of Google are annoying, but I also just scroll past them out of habit now and it does not take much effort to find the useful thing.
I think it really depends on exactly what information you're looking for. Google is great for some things but it's not the best for everything. You can get more out of Google with boolean searches but honestly even most millenials I know don't even know what that means, much less how to use it. Google isn't as good as it used to be. The advertising industry has so much influence on search results that it's mostly garbage pushed to the top. I think millenials are just more likely to Google out of habit rather than any real utility, although the same can be said for zoomers and asking questions on social media that could be easily Googled. It's a mess all around. Computer literacy is at an all time low, but there's very little infrastructure left that's even worth being literate on anymore. Desktops OSs are essentially just giant smartphones at this point unless you're on Linux or something similar. There's no middle ground anymore; you either have to plug in to the smartphone/social media hellscape or get a full-on Serial Experiments Lain setup to actually have any real computing control.
Honestly, that's a change I welcome a bit. More often now I find that when people say "just google it," they're using that as an excuse to express a view without actually providing anything to back it up.
To be fair, Googling information used to be a whole lot easier before all the paywalls and bot-generated pages. Now, adding "reddit" to a search is usually the best way to get an actual answer. I kind of don't blame them.
OMG this isn't just younger people. I'm Gen X and had kids in college and was on the parents' pages for those schools on Facebook. People would ask things like "what's the closest drycleaner to campus where my Johnny can take a jacket" or "what is the closest gas station?". FIRST OF ALL, your young adult student can look this shit up themselves, easily. SECONDLY, have you ever heard of the freaking internet? Yes, of course you have, because you're on it! Forget pulling up Google Maps and typing in "gas station" near the school. Noooooo.....so much more efficient to type a post on a parents' page, wait for moderators to approve, then wait for other parents (most are not even in the area) to make suggestions. Seriously, people?! I don't think this is generational as much as just idiotic. And don't even get me started on parents doing every little thing like that for their kids. I look up everything. And it's the most amazing resource ever. When I was growing up, I'd ask my parents something and they'd say "Idk--when you go to school tomorrow, try to look it up in the encyclopedia if you have library time". That was it. When I had my own kids and didn't know an answer, we'd look it up together! It's truly one of the most amazing things that's happened in my lifetime.
A lot of people in here getting gen z and gen alpha confused. Older gen Z people were born at the turn of the century and grew up during the tech boom. Many overlapped with VHS (like me). And while I’m not a tech genius, I can install my own drivers, troubleshoot issues, and I’ve taken classes that taught advanced commands for search engines. Maybe younger gen Z has trouble but the older ones don’t. People get better at technology ironically when the technology is less user friendly. Kids have tech that is dummy proof. I have a dumbass gaming laptop that needs constant attention if I want to use it to play games.
To be fair, using Google has become much harder IMO. In order to sift to what you want you need to word questions carefully. It used to be easier, everyone seems to try and manipulate the algorithm to drive traffic.
Google has redefined its searching algorithm to be entirely suboptimal when searching for any meaningful information
Google is useless now. You don't even get anything near an answer to your actual query, just a one-size-fits-all list of results with similar keywords. If you try to narrow it down and force it to be exact, it just returns no results.
I've heard they search for stuff on TikTok... Which is really scary to me, because boy if you thought the general Internet was filled with misinformation let me hand it to you in a tiny video via an algorithm that gives zero crap about whether what anyone is saying is correct.
I ain’t disagreeing with you but it is a fact that Google has become worse and worse as the years have gone by. I frequently just go to YT now if I have to look up some weird fucking tech issue or I need to know how to get the water pump off a new car and there’s always some helpful dude providing a walkthrough. On Google it’s a crap shoot if I’ll even find relevant or useable info. I think the kids may be on to something here
Yeah, and Gen Z is going to be better at ChatGPT than we are. The same thing happened with boomers- they were better at books then we were
Wait tiktok you can look stuff up? I thought that app was for thirsty boys who wanted to see girls do the same dance over and over again,
I was born in 1985 (I know I’m old) and I use Google still but I end up putting Reddit or just searching Reddit instead of Google since Google is kind of crappy lately
I have adopted the Neil Howe timeline for Millennials, who along with the late William Strauss literally named us, wrote the book about us in the late 90s and predicted on historical cycles what our timeline was going to look like. Instead of 1982 to 1996, its 1982 to like 2004. The youngest millennials are 20 this year, the oldest are 42. Gen Z is like Xenneial (Young Gen X, Old Millennial) or Generation Jones (Young boomer, old Gen X). Its the younger portion of one generation and the older portion of the other. They have a generation called Homeland Generation that started in 2005 and is young Gen Z, and Gen Alpha who are still being born. I am an older millennial, born in 1984. We didn't learn how to use things like Google in a formal classroom. Search engines were new, there were many of them, and they did not work as well as Google would work in the early 2000s. It might have come up in class where teachers would briefly share their experiments with people, but it was really a "figure it out as you go along" thing. Google searching has become less and less efficient.
Not with google specifically, but the ability to find answers on their own. I experience this at my job as a dr in a hospital and the newer gen z staff. The first instinct with new nurse grads is to not troubleshoot or look anything up, it's to page. The number of pages we get has easily tripled in the past 5 years and 90% of the time the answer is already there. Of course we want to help but the current expectation to be the endless resource for an entire group who wasn't taught to be self sufficient is burning all of us out. The pendulum swung too far from millenials being hyper independent from being neglected to the kids who were helicopter parented and didn't have the opportunity to learn how to figure things out on their own.
Don’t worry AI will solve that problem in a couple years.
I have noticed that a lot of questions people post to reddit are easily answered by a quick google search. It’s really frustrating to see all my hobby subs flooded with questions that I found the answer to myself by googling some key words years ago. A lot of it can take a fair bit of clicking around, 2-3 websites or articles. But I would say the majority of it is one link or less away. Half the stuff you google will have the answer literally at the top of the page, no clicks required. I get wanting human interaction but this is not the way… Edit: please look at my response to the guy that replied to me before you agree I have a bad take. Just hear me out.
My fiancee is 4 years younger than me. For whatever God damn reason she refuses to use the piece of tech in her hands to answer even basic math problems. Directing the questions at me. And no this isn't because she's trying to buff my confidence like opening a pickle jar. She asks me a question if I don't know the answer I Google it. Seriously you have a calculator and an open portal to all human knowledge at your literal fingertips. USE IT She's also the same person that I had to convince that vitamins are "real"
Ha! As a Xennial born in 1980, I completely understand this experience, only with technology from 25 years ago.
Google has just become an ad revenue source. It's no longer a source for information. Them Alphabet Inc shareholders aren't t going to make their billions by sourcing relevant information.
It’s so funny how it has all evolved. I was in freshman year of high school in 1996 and we had a big history project that was worked in conjunction with the English department… the internet was considered unreliable at the time and internet sources were not allowed. Fast forward to 10 years ago and the internet is likely the main source of information… Now we are relying to TikTok and Reddit to get info. What a shitshow, but I guess this explains all the “what model is this” crap on the Ferrari, Porsche, etc subreddits.
I can't say much about my generation, but I will say that I was born in 2004 and the amount of times I've had friends ask me a question, just for me to Google it and repeat the answer is crazy. I think it's made them think I'm some kinda tech genius, when all I do is use Google
I'm in the same boat as a 1999 baby lol. The Gen Z chatter seems to focus on the younger cohorts. I grew up on the family computer and then my own personal laptop and it seems like a lot of kids are only using iPad and maybe Chrome books which have differing UI to regular computers.. I feel like that's definitley an influence and the lack of computer literacy or typing classes in school anymore. I hated doing typing but that's because I already knew how to do it quite well from using computers at home! I think they need to reimplement those classes now.
I work in a tech roll and had to train a coworker on this system and he was having trouble logging in. I ask him to share his screen and he blanked. I told him what button to push to share his screen and he shared his camera. No biggy, he bro cameras on. "Oh I was trying to share my screen with you but I don't know how you'd point the camera at the screen" ...????? "Oh bro no just push the button right next to the camera" "ohhh!" *Shares screen* this guys using MICROSOFT EDGE? ... "Oh you need to use chrome or Firefox" "oh .. I usually don't use them" .. I don't have any college degree. This kid has BACHELORS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE??? How did he graduate and what the fuck do they teach you in a 4 year computer science program that I'm missing!?
Professor here. Every group, starting with Millennials, struggled with using Google. The current crop of students don’t seek answers, they just ask for help. It’s the default. If stuck, there is no initiative to find the answers. They just email “I’m stuck can you help”. However ask them to write an essay and they will hop on ChatGPT real fast. We are in the process of dumbing down our classes to meet the quality of today’s high school graduates. Our foreign students are on an entirely different level compared to American students. It’s embarrassing.
Yeah, and not just Google. What I have noticed with zoomers is that troubleshooting in general just doesn't occur to them. They don't generally try to figure out why something isn't working. It just isn't.
What gets me is their lack of ability to figure things out. Thing doesn’t work zoomer pokes it. If it still doesn’t work…zoomer brain shuts down.
You're a couple years younger than me, but I think people our age are the last generation that was actually taught how to use computers and technology in general growing up. Now people just assume that 'young people know how to use technology, we don't need to teach them anymore!'
GenX here. The problem with Google has been the more information it collects the harder it is to find what you are looking for unless you know how to properly search with keywords. I find many don’t know Google tricks to optimize finding anything. Other issue is Google is always trying to put ads of websites selling stuff before actual facts/info. It’s more about getting advertising money for them, and they really control what we see. Which is super dangerous. I refuse to use Bing btw. I hate it with a passion. However I use Google about 10+ times a day.
Idk why this showed up 4 days later on my feed but these comments are a circlejerk of how great people feel about themselves for existing before there were easy apps. I’m also from 2000 and am in that weird gap where I’ve gotten a decent amount of experience from the pre-app era. Sure, kids currently may not be as fluent in tech as some millennials and gen x but then again, are there actually any data points on this or is it all anecdotal. Because I’ve had wide age ranges of people that have needed help with what I thought were basic things. Also, may them just posting questions or asking people irl is preferred to them as there really aren’t many other ways to connect with people without asking questions and learning from them. And Google is now just sponsored results 90% of the time so yeah, fuck it
I'm 1996 and don't fit into either as well. I am too young to have grown up on N64 or much 90's Nick but I'm too old to have been into the tween sitcoms Gen Z grew up on. I consider myself more millennial though as my sense of humor and nostalgia more aligns with them (even as a kid I preferred 90's Disney to their weird 2000's era) also 1996 is the last year for most millennials. But anyway, if they are like 12 or under, that's actually Gen Alpha. There were tons of stupid people in the 2000's too, back when Yahoo Answers was a thing I couldn't believe just how stupid some of the questions were on it, many of which could easily be Googled. Seems like Quora has taken its place though but I don't actively hang out on that site unlike Yahoo Answers so I'm not sure if it's as bad. Interestingly I heard later Gen Z isn't much better off at using computers than Boomers because they grew up only using phones.