Wes’s Life

There are some people who I keep close to me that seem to use me as their own per­sonal search engine. This didn’t just occur when I came to Vir­ginia Tech, it’s been hap­pen­ing since high school. People will pop up and ask me about some­thing that could take five sec­onds to find on Google. At some point I tried to reason out why some­one would do this and it’s fairly simple: it’s seem­ingly faster and easier to find better results.

Yet, I (and anyone else you may depend upon) won’t always be there. True, there are some fairly obvi­ous excep­tions to that rule, but even those select few (family and sig­nif­i­cant others) can be busy for the brief moment you need the answer. So I think that you should spend the time to learn how to find the infor­ma­tion you need. I once had a pro­fes­sor tell me that Google was infe­rior to the bou­tique search engines he seemed to prefer that had “better list­ings”, yet I had to argue that it’s not that Google is infe­rior because of its list­ings, its because people don’t gen­er­ally know their way around it. So the next time you are think­ing about asking your friend for help on some­thing that might take five sec­onds of effort on Google, don’t waste his time.