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Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

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snerbles·

> Google is my personal librarian

While certainly an improvement over legacy media, are you not trading one information curator for another?

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Yes.. but my thinking was not that that so much as the level of effort to research any topic.

Say, for example, you wanted to know how your representative voted. Or, you wanted to see how other universities planned for the March on DC January 20? Or, you simply wanted to know the preamble to the Constitution (which we now have on our phone but I know my family didn't have that at home).

If you wanted some standard text like the constitution, university and public libraries were usually an available source, but definitely not "at your fingertips" by any means.

Encyclopedia put it at your fingertips. Our household had a general Encyclopedia Americana, then specialty encyclopedias for subjects such as science, the occult, and a couple others not coming to mind at the moment. Most kids I knew had at least a basic encyclopedia at home. I mean... how else would you do your homework?

In those days you actually learned the preamble to the Constitution in school. I still remember it 35 years later.

It's required in every classroom in AZ.

I think it's part of the common core curriculum so it's likely required in every public school in America now.

While there is a point of view encoded in the algorithms that Google runs, I see it as more of an indexer than a curator. It's not the same thing, is it? Especially when the index is somewhat tailored to my preferences (when I'm logged in).

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