Are Search Engines Making Our Lives Easier or Hurting Us?

Lev, Grossman."How Computers Know What We Want-Before We Do." Time Magazine. 27 May 2010. Web. 28 January 2011

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In the magazine article “How Computers Know What We Want Before We Do,” author Lev Grossman discusses how recommendation search engines are taking over our social lives. He goes into telling how when people use these search engines to make a decision it is actually just giving the person results from the previous users. Also it takes out the communication with others, for instance back in the day a video store clerk referred movies to people and now Netflix and a variety of other recommendation search engines basically tell people what to watch not based on their personnel preference, but by other peoples votes of what they have liked in the past. Over the last ten years recommendation engines have become abundant over the web. According to a report by industry analyst Forrester, one-third of the people who notice a recommendation engine on the Internet end up buying something based on the recommendation engines results. These search engines process outstanding quantities of data and use very high-level math. They are trying to second-guess a human form of behavior.

The author Lev Grossman’s point of view is that these recommendation engines are not as reliable as they may seem. They are recommending things that other people want and like instead of letting a person actually make a genuine decision about something based on there preferences. The author mentions that recommendation engines are a world of making choices, and the world usually cant get enough of that. He goes to say that recommendation engines are the worst enemy of the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. The recommendation engines keep people from experiencing new things because they are designed to keep people in a comfy rut, and keep people in the same category instead of allowing people to experience new things that could also bring happiness. These search engines have the reputation of making people end up right where they stated. Even though some people may see this as making their life easier, the author seems to feel as if they are trapping people and not allowing people to use their own brain to the best of their ability.