I recently had a potential opportunity to work as an independent technical contractor for a local manufacturer. But doing so required registering as a sole proprietor, a domain that I had no experience in. Google rarely lets me down, so I figured I’d start my research there.
Sure enough, Google had answers. Roughly a million answers, in fact. But usually it is problems of a technical nature that I’m investigating. When I’m analyzing results for those types of queries I find that I subconsciously ignore the cruft. There always seems to be at least one person suggesting that deleting the system32 folder will fix your blue screen of death. Or that microwaving your phone is a good work around for your lost charging cable. Those answers don’t even register. They’re filtered away almost totally subconsciously. But this wasn’t the case now that I was on unfamiliar ground. There were government pages that intuitively seemed the most promising, but they were certainly not written for someone lacking experience. There were thousands of results that were easier to comprehend, but I didn’t know which ones to trust. They all had different answers, and many of them outright contradictory. I’m sure some of them were the business equivalent of deleting system32.
That got me thinking of the popular passive-aggressive meme site Let Me Google That for You. It can be fun and hilarious to be sure. But I think we who are technology professionals need to be careful before using it. Finding a solution may be as simple as typing it into Google for us, but that is because the toxic results are being subliminally filtered away by our years of experience. We should try our best to be patient and empathetic; for someone else the correct answer may be a needle in a haystack, a haystack filled with booby traps!
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