When Search Engines Merge

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s impossible to avoid technology. And why would you want to? It’s nothing to have the next big thing being born right in your backyard. I still have yet to see a google car driving itself down the street, but everyone here has seen the mappers driving around neighborhoods. One enterprising bay area man calculated when the map car came to his street, and stood outside his house with a big sign that said “Will you marry me?” He asked his girlfriend to look up the map for his house, and had a ring ready and waiting for her reaction.

That kind of enterprising nature is indicative of the bay area. It’s nothing to have tech giants as your next-door neighbor, or bump into a rocket scientist at the grocery store. It’s a little annoying for some of us who aren’t quite glued to our smartphones or who haven’t yet seen (and don’t want to see) “Gangnam Style” on youtube. Still, it’s pretty cool to have driver-less cars wandering around your neighborhood. When my mom comes to visit, she always marvels at the bike lanes painted ostentatiously on the road. I’m not sure she can handle seeing a car drive itself.

Then you have the search engine giants who acquire other giants. When Google ingested Youtube, many people expressed concern that the latter site would be unrecognizable, but I’ve found that hasn’t quite happened. If anything, it’s made it easier to use my favorite search engine. If I’m looking for a video, I just punch in a few keywords into the search engine tab on my browser, and if there’s a popular video related to the keywords, the video pops right up without any hesitation.

Technology advances come with praise and frustrations alike. Many people curse the very smartphones they stood in line for a whole day to buy. I love my phone and even I complain when my favorite social networking site crashes it. But overall, I think advances can be a great thing, assuming the guys behind the computer chip understand the humans they’re creating the product for.

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