Angela L. Das

In my freelance journeys I’ve gone everywhere from having an office of my own with a view of the Hollywood sign, to sitting in open office plans, to sitting in a blackened cubicle in a maze of identically spaced and completely nondescript office walls with strict rules on “personalization”. At the moment, I’m sharing my daytime office with 4 other people. And not for the first time, I realize how although my environment changes from contract to contract, one thing never does: I google everything.

When I say “everything”, I do literally mean all things possible to google. Someone in my office asks what an obscure acronym means, and I’m the first to know. Mostly quiet and serious in the workplace, I can assure you this is a surface thing. Under the calm exterior is an avid googler, googling away at the speed of light and sound. In the process of writing this article, I have already googled four things, which I kept track of by opening multiple tabs in Firefox:

1. Recognizing that I am a Googleholic, I decided to google support groups in my area. Result: One poor Facebook page in Ohio called “Googlers Anonymous” that has only 26 members. These members seem more interested in new Google news than in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive Googling.
2. In choosing the title of this article, I was curious to know if anyone else had already written similar content. Result: No. But someone did hyphenate “Google-holic”, which lead me to my next search…
3. Should “Googling” be capitalized? Result: No. Google and “to google” as a verb joined the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2006, which again, I actually knew, but had to google just to make sure.
4. Googling again, I was lead to its first known usage, in a blogpost by Larry Page in 2006 which ended “…keep googling!”. Subsequently, I edited this info on Wikipedia.

As a former Google employee (where the office was open plan, if you were curious), I feel like I am somewhat justified in my manic obsession to Google things. I know it is the fastest, most efficient resource at my fingertips. I was an avid googler before working there (which is, in fact, how I got a job there, too). As an academic, I also understand that it’s like having the entire web categorized like a library at my doorstep, which I can visit any time of day or night, rain or shine, and regardless of whether or not my books are seriously overdue. To me, Google allows me to cross reference information at high speeds (since I type as fast as I think most of the time), and come up with well-researched information about anything from the best ways to grill toast (for my current job) to finding replacement shoelaces at bargain prices (which my husband needed).

A friend of mine on Facebook who was concluding her PhD at Oxford once posted that she was considering only limiting her internet time to an hour a day, including Facebook and Googling time. I thought she was mad until I realized I’d broken into a bit of a cold sweat over the thought of it. What would I do if I couldn’t Google? The anxiety rose up in my throat as I realized how many things I would just sit and wonder about, or if my teenage years were an indication, how many hours I would have to spend reading the encyclopedias in the library. Yes, if you didn’t know this by now, I am a true geek.

As I conclude this article, I’m resisting the urge to google many more things. I feel like this urge is exactly what makes me so good at what I do since I am updating myself daily on how search works, what’s new in the search world, and what’s new with Google. The point though is to understand that if you have met me or work with me, or are thinking about working with me, this is one of my quirks and one of my strongest selling points: I am a googleholic.