Googling:?The mantra of project work

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When was the last time a project that required research made you nervous because you just didn’t know where to begin? And do you remember a time when the statement, ‘I don’t know’ wasn’t followed by a ‘then Google it’? Part revolution, part all-seeing-eye as the Net cradles the world’s information for us to choose — Google, so ubiquitous it’s now a verb, has changed the way we think and study.
Madhumitha Vasan, 17, a student of R. Ruia College says, “It is the most essential tool for project work and research on any subject. It has made our lives so much easier and saved us so much time! Answers to all our questions are just a click away.”
Once research implied stacks of mouldy books, reference papers, pages of notes and hours holed up in libraries chasing leads through bibliographies. But to the current generation of students that method seems archaic. Why waste time and effort when you can just Google?
Laura Fernandes, a first year engineering student, believes the Net holds all the answers, “I don’t think there’s any need to worry about accuracy or authenticity when it comes to information off the Net. It offers you a wide variety of options from websites hosted by various companies.”
But how much Google is too much Google? Students may blindly trust the Net but the search engine does not rank sites according to authenticity. While blatant untruths and misinformation are obvious, inaccuracies can pass undetected.
Aditya Sarnaik, a professor at R Ruia College says, “Google is a good quick search option to obtain basic information. Even teachers use Wikipedia and Google to look up certain topics. But students should know how authentic the sites they pick up info from are, because sometimes even one misplaced word can change the meaning of the whole sentence. They rely on the Net which is okay so long as they verify how accurate the content is.”
The Net is an open forum that allows anyone to post information, regardless of their motive or knowledge — a reality that is both blessing and curse for the online researcher. Shivani Parasnis, a FYBSc student is wary of this, “Search engines like Google give us many options but it’s not always useful. A process that is completely automated and dependent on the keywords we type in cannot be foolproof. Sometimes the links thrown up have no relevance to the topic we are working on.”
And while Saket Mani, a class 12 student of Hyderabad Public School does use the Net to research projects, he is not completely dependent on it, “We’ve often found facts off the Net to be inaccurate. I still turn to Wikipedia or Google to run a search, but I usually verify the information on an official website on the subject.”
All this proves that while the Net can point you in the right direction, ‘Googling’ is never a substitute for real research.