Google Makes Your Memory Worse: The Google Effect

An unexpected side effect from using Google regularly. Apparently depending on the search engine to find results for questions you have can make you not prioritize retaining memories for information.

This is called “The Google effect” and was discovered by students doing research at Columbia and Harvard. This effect seems to adjust people’s abilities to change from being able to memorize information to having an ability to know where to look for this information.

How this affects SEO and people’s willingness to follow advertisements online, who knows – but it would seem that people are relying more and more upon these details so if anything use of both should only increase further.

Discovery of this random Google trivia can be credited to a Reddit user named Gluttz.