About two-thirds of search engine users disapprove of the collection of information on their searches for the purpose of personalizing their future search results and an equal proportion of all internet users disapprove of being tracked for the purpose of getting targeted ads.

These findings are a backdrop for the ongoing policy debates about privacy, collection of personal information online, and the enthusiasm for targeted search and targeted advertising among companies. They also arise as Google implements a new privacy policy in which information about users’ online behavior when they are signed into Google’s programs can be collected and combined into a cohesive user profile. This includes material from Google’s search engine, the Google+ social networking site, YouTube video-sharing site, and Gmail.

When it comes to limiting access to personal information online, 38% of internet users say they are aware of ways they themselves can limit how much information about them is collected by a website. Among this group, the most common strategies include deleting web histories, using the privacy settings of websites and changing their browser settings.

Read the full report which also includes these findings:

• Search engine use over time
• Overall views of search engine performance
• The demographics of search users
• User views on the quality of search information

Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email. Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Even as early as 2002, more than eight in ten online adults were using search engines, and more than nine in ten online adults were emailing.

Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.

Read the full report, including details on use of search and email by different demographic groups, at pewinternet.org

As our studies have shown, the percentage of internet users who employ search engines has risen steadily over the last decade. Analysis of Nielsen Netratings data finds that lots of traffic to news sites is referred by search engines. The online news industry is in the middle of a huge debate about its relationship to search engines and aggregators. Should an organization allow Google to crawl and index their site or not? That’s a huge unsettled question in some segments of the industry. Several experiments now underway or soon to occur should provide answers as to whether search engines are revenue enhancers or revenue detractors from news sites. A second consideration is that the major search engines have for years provided email news alerts that alert people to new mentions of subjects that matter to them. My sense is that the “alert” process will become even more compelling and important as more and more people connect to the internet wirelessly. We already see that among “on the go” news consumers. You can find much more about the challenges to the news media spawned by the rise of the internet in the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “State of the News Media 2010” report and the joint Pew Internet Project/PEJ report “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer“.

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project

Respondents to the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovation that will occur. The survey required them to assess 10 different “tension pairs” – each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes – and to select the one most likely choice of two statements. Although a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and interested institutions was sought, this survey, fielded from Dec. 2, 2009 to Jan. 11, 2010, should not be taken as a representative canvassing of internet experts. By design, the survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort.

Among the issues addressed in the survey was the provocative question raised by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2008¹: “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. “I’m not thinking the way I used to,” he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”

Jamais Cascio, an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, challenged Carr in a subsequent article in the Atlantic Monthly. Cascio made the case that the array of problems facing humanity – the end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, among others – will force us to get smarter if we are to survive. “Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way,” he wrote. “In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity.” He argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans’ capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing “fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge.” He also expressed hope that techies will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

With that as backdrop, respondents were asked to indicate which of two statements best reflected their view on Google’s effect on intelligence. The chart shows the distribution of responses to the paired statements. The first column covers the answers of 371 longtime experts who have regularly participated in these surveys. The second column covers the answers of all the respondents, including the 524 who were recruited by other experts or by their association with the Pew Internet Project. As shown, 76% of the experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.”

Respondents were also asked to “share your view of the internet’s influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 — what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?” What follows is a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations and some of the recurring themes in those answers:

Nicholas Carr and Google staffers have their say:

• “I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”– Nicholas Carr

•  “My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist. I would also like to say that Carr has it mostly backwards when he says that Google is built on the principles of Taylorism [the institution of time-management and worker-activity standards in industrial settings]. Taylorism shifts responsibility from worker to management, institutes a standard method for each job, and selects workers with skills unique for a specific job. Google does the opposite, shifting responsibility from management to the worker, encouraging creativity in each job, and encouraging workers to shift among many different roles in their career….Carr is of course right that Google thrives on understanding data. But making sense of data (both for Google internally and for its users) is not like building the same artifact over and over on an assembly line; rather it requires creativity, a mix of broad and deep knowledge, and a host of connections to other people. That is what Google is trying to facilitate.” — Peter Norvig, Google Research Director

•  “Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.” – Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

The resources of the internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities. We won’t have to remember as much, but we’ll have to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. Less time devoted to memorization gives people more time to master those new skills.

•  “Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions.” — Paul Jones, ibiblio, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

• “Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses.” — Marcel Bullinga, Dutch Futurist at futurecheck.com

•  “I think that certain tasks will be ‘offloaded’ to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that is a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research.” — Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant

• “What the internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under “Google”) does is to support SOME parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by REPLACING other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because “Google” will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because “Google” will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more “stupid” by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers.” — Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine

• “It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (‘more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (‘more intelligent’).” — Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

• “The new learning system, more informal perhaps than formal, will eventually win since we must use technology to cause everyone to learn more, more economically and faster if everyone is to be economically productive and prosperous. Maintaining the status quo will only continue the existing win/lose society that we have with those who can learn in present school structure doing ok, while more and more students drop out, learn less, and fail to find a productive niche in the future.” —  Ed Lyell, former member of the Colorado State Board of Education and Telecommunication Advisory Commission

• “The question is flawed: Google will make intelligence different. As Carr himself suggests, Plato argued that reading and writing would make us stupid, and from the perspective of a preliterate, he was correct. Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a side-show act. Being able to quickly and effectively discover information and solve problems, rather than do it “in your head,” will be the metric we use.” — Alex Halavais, vice president, Association of Internet Researchers

•  “What Google does do is simply to enable us to shift certain tasks to the network — we no longer need to rote-learn certain seldomly-used facts (the periodic table, the post code of Ballarat) if they’re only a search away, for example. That’s problematic, of course — we put an awful amount of trust in places such as Wikipedia where such information is stored, and in search engines like Google through which we retrieve it — but it doesn’t make us stupid, any more than having access to a library (or in fact, access to writing) makes us stupid. That said, I don’t know that the reverse is true, either: Google and the Net also don’t automatically make us smarter. By 2020, we will have even more access to even more information, using even more sophisticated search and retrieval tools — but how smartly we can make use of this potential depends on whether our media literacies and capacities have caught up, too.” — Axel Bruns, Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology

• “My ability to do mental arithmetic is worse than my grandfather’s because I grew up in an era with pervasive personal calculators…. I am not stupid compared to my grandfather, but I believe the development of my brain has been changed by the availability of technology. The same will happen (or is happening) as a result of the Googleization of knowledge. People are becoming used to bite sized chunks of information that are compiled and sorted by an algorithm. This must be having an impact on our brains, but it is too simplistic to say that we are becoming stupid as a result of Google.” — Robert Acklund, Australian National University

• “We become adept at using useful tools, and hence perfect new skills. Other skills may diminish. I agree with Carr that we may on the average become less patient, less willing to read through a long, linear text, but we may also become more adept at dealing with multiple factors…. Note that I said ‘less patient,’ which is not the same as ‘lower IQ.’ I suspect that emotional and personality changes will probably more marked than ‘intelligence’ changes.” — Larry Press, California State University, Dominguz Hills

Technology isn’t the problem here. It is people’s inherent character traits. The internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.

• “The question is all about people’s choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don’t give us, we’ll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. We can’t blame search engines for that…. What search engines do is provide more information, which we can use either to become dilettantes (Carr’s worry) or to bolster our knowledge around the edges and do fact-checking while we rely mostly on information we’ve gained in more robust ways for our core analyses. Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr’s article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend.” — Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O’Reilly Media

•  “Google isn’t making us stupid — but it is making many of us intellectually lazy. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments. Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy. And it’s the students most in need of research training who are the least likely to avail themselves of more sophisticated tools like Google Scholar. Like other major technologies, Google’s search functionality won’t push the human intellect in one predetermined direction. It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them.” — David Ellis, York University, Toronto

•  “For people who are readers and who are willing to explore new sources and new arguments, we can only be made better by the kinds of searches we will be able to do. Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google. Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting.” — Oscar Gandy, emeritus professor, University of Pennsylvania

• “I don’t think having access to information can ever make anyone stupider. I don’t think an adult’s IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though.” — Sandra Kelly, market researcher, 3M Corporation

•  “The story of humankind is that of work substitution and human enhancement. The Neolithic revolution brought the substitution of some human physical work by animal work. The Industrial revolution brought more substitution of human physical work by machine work. The Digital revolution is implying a significant substitution of human brain work by computers and ICTs in general. Whenever a substitution has taken place, men have been able to focus on more qualitative tasks, entering a virtuous cycle: the more qualitative the tasks, the more his intelligence develops; and the more intelligent he gets, more qualitative tasks he can perform…. As obesity might be the side-effect of physical work substitution by machines, mental laziness can become the watermark of mental work substitution by computers, thus having a negative effect instead of a positive one.” — Ismael Peña-Lopez, lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science

• “Well, of course, it depends on what one means by ‘stupid’ — I imagine that Google, and its as yet unimaginable new features and capabilities will both improve and decrease some of our human capabilities. Certainly it’s much easier to find out stuff, including historical, accurate, and true stuff, as well as entertaining, ironic, and creative stuff. It’s also making some folks lazier, less concerned about investing in the time and energy to arrive at conclusions, etc.” — Ron Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara

•  ”Nick [Carr] says, ‘Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ Besides finding that a little hard to believe (I know Nick to be a deep diver, still), there is nothing about Google, or the Net, to keep anyone from diving — and to depths that were not reachable before the Net came along.”– Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”

It’s not Google’s fault if users create stupid queries.

•  “To be more precise, unthinking use of the Internet, and in particular untutored use of Google, has the ability to make us stupid, but that is not a foregone conclusion. More and more of us experience attention deficit, like Bruce Friedman in the Nicholas Carr article, but that alone does not stop us making good choices provided that the ‘factoids’ of information are sound that we use to make out decisions. The potential for stupidity comes where we rely on Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, or any engine) to provide relevant information in response to poorly constructed queries, frequently one-word queries, and then base decisions or conclusions on those returned items.” — Peter Griffiths, former Head of Information at the Home Office within the Office of the Chief Information Officer, United Kingdom

• “The problem isn’t Google; it’s what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves.” — Esther Dyson, longtime internet expert and investor

•  “People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I’m wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth.” — Craig Newmark, founder Craig’s List

• “Google is a data access tool. Not all of that data is useful or correct. I suspect the amount of misleading data is increasing faster than the amount of correct data. There should also be a distinction made between data and information. Data is meaningless in the absence of an organizing context. That means that different people looking at the same data are likely to come to different conclusions. There is a big difference with what a world class artist can do with a paint brush as opposed to a monkey. In other words, the value of Google will depend on what the user brings to the game. The value of data is highly dependent on the quality of the question being asked.” — Robert Lunn, consultant, FocalPoint Analytics

The big struggle is over what kind of information Google and other search engines kick back to users. In the age of social media where users can be their own content creators it might get harder and harder to separate high-quality material from junk.

• “Access to more information isn’t enough — the information needs to be correct, timely, and presented in a manner that enables the reader to learn from it. The current network is full of inaccurate, misleading, and biased information that often crowds out the valid information. People have not learned that ‘popular’ or ‘available’ information is not necessarily valid.”– Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

•  ”If we take ‘Google’ to mean the complex social, economic and cultural phenomenon that is a massively interactive search and retrieval information system used by people and yet also using them to generate its data, I think Google will, at the very least, not make us smarter and probably will make us more stupid in the sense of being reliant on crude, generalised approximations of truth and information finding. Where the questions are easy, Google will therefore help; where the questions are complex, we will flounder.” — Matt Allen, former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia

•  “The challenge is in separating that wheat from the chaff, as it always has been with any other source of mass information, which has been the case all the way back to ancient institutions like libraries. Those users (of Google, cable TV, or libraries) who can do so efficiently will beat the odds, becoming ‘smarter’ and making better choices. However, the unfortunately majority will continue to remain, as Carr says, stupid.” — Christopher Saunders, managing editor, internetnews.com

• “The problem with Google that is lurking just under the clean design home page is the “tragedy of the commons”: the link quality seems to go down every year. The link quality may actually not be going down but the signal to noise is getting worse as commercial schemes lead to more and more junk links.” — Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard

Literary intelligence is very much under threat.

•  “If one defines — or partially defines — IQ as literary intelligence, the ability to sit with a piece of textual material and analyze it for complex meaning and retain derived knowledge, then we are indeed in trouble. Literary culture is in trouble…. We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible…. One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, Facebook pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment…. This type of content generation, this method of ‘writing,’ is not only sub-literate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse…. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills.” — Patrick Tucker, senior editor, The Futurist magazine

New literacies will be required to function in this world. In fact, the internet might change the very notion of what it means to be smart. Retrieval of good information will be prized. Maybe a race of “extreme Googlers” will come into being.

•  “The critical uncertainty here is whether people will learn and be taught the essential literacies necessary for thriving in the current infosphere: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness are the ones I’m concentrating on. I have no reason to believe that people will be any less credulous, gullible, lazy, or prejudiced in ten years, and am not optimistic about the rate of change in our education systems, but it is clear to me that people are not going to be smarter without learning the ropes.” — Howard Rheingold, author of several prominent books on technology, teacher at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley

•  ”Google makes us simultaneously smarter and stupider. Got a question? With instant access to practically every piece of information ever known to humankind, we take for granted we’re only a quick web search away from the answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean we understand it. In the coming years we will have to continue to teach people to think critically so they can better understand the wealth of information available to them.” — Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab 

•  ”We might imagine that in ten years, our definition of intelligence will look very different. By then, we might agree on ‘smart’ as something like a ‘networked’ or ‘distributed’ intelligence where knowledge is our ability to piece together various and disparate bits of information into coherent and novel forms.” — Christine Greenhow, educational researcher, University of Minnesota and Yale Information and Society Project

•  ”Human intellect will shift from the ability to retain knowledge towards the skills to discover the information i.e. a race of extreme Googlers (or whatever discovery tools come next). The world of information technology will be dominated by the algorithm designers and their librarian cohorts. Of course, the information they’re searching has to be right in the first place. And who decides that?” — Sam Michel, founder Chinwag, community for digital media practitioners in the United Kingdom

One new “literacy” that might help is the capacity to build and use social networks to help people solve problems.

• “There’s no doubt that the internet is an extension of human intelligence, both individual and collective. But the extent to which it’s able to augment intelligence depends on how much people are able to make it conform to their needs. Being able to look up who starred in the 2nd season of the Tracey Ullman show on Wikipedia is the lowest form of intelligence augmentation; being able to build social networks and interactive software that helps you answer specific questions or enrich your intellectual life is much more powerful. This will matter even more as the internet becomes more pervasive. Already my iPhone functions as the external, silicon lobe of my brain. For it to help me become even smarter, it will need to be even more effective and flexible than it already is. What worries me is that device manufacturers and internet developers are more concerned with lock-in than they are with making people smarter. That means it will be a constant struggle for individuals to reclaim their intelligence from the networks they increasingly depend upon.” — Dylan Tweney, senior editor, Wired magazine

Nothing can be bad that delivers more information to people, more efficiently. It might be that some people lose their way in this world, but overall, societies will be substantially smarter.

•  “The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult.” — John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

• “Google is simply one step, albeit a major one, in the continuing continuum of how technology changes our generation and use of data, information, and knowledge that has been evolving for decades. As the data and information goes digital and new information is created, which is at an ever increasing rate, the resultant ability to evaluate, distill, coordinate, collaborate, problem solve only increases along a similar line. Where it may appear a ‘dumbing down’ has occurred on one hand, it is offset (I believe in multiples) by how we learn in new ways to learn, generate new knowledge, problem solve, and innovate.” — Mario Morino, Chairman, Venture Philanthropy Partners

Google itself and other search technologies will get better over time and that will help solve problems created by too-much-information and too-much-distraction.

• “I’m optimistic that Google will get smarter by 2020 or will be replaced by a utility that is far better than Google. That tool will allow queries to trigger chains of high-quality information — much closer to knowledge than flood. Humans who are able to access these chains in high-speed, immersive ways will have more patters available to them that will aid decision-making. All of this optimism will only work out if the battle for the soul of the Internet is won by the right people — the people who believe that open, fast, networks are good for all of us.” — Susan Crawford, former member of President Obama’s National Economic Council, now on the law faculty at the University of Michigan

•  ”If I am using Google to find an answer, it is very likely the answer I find will be on a message board in which other humans are collaboratively debating answers to questions. I will have to choose between the answer I like the best. Or it will force me to do more research to find more information. Google never breeds passivity or stupidity in me: It catalyzes me to explore further. And along the way I bump into more humans, more ideas and more answers.” — Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow for Digital Media & Public Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency

The more we use the internet and search, the more dependent on it we will become.

•  ”As the Internet gets more sophisticated it will enable a greater sense of empowerment among users. We will not be more stupid, but we will probably be more dependent upon it.” — Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Even in little ways, including in dinner table chitchat, Google can make people smarter.

• “[Family dinner conversations] have changed markedly because we can now look things up at will. That’s just one small piece of evidence I see that having Google at hand is great for civilization.” — Jerry Michalski, president, Sociate

‘We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.’

• “The answer is really: both. Google has already made us smarter, able to make faster choices from more information. Children, to say nothing of adults, scientists and professionals in virtually every field, can seek and discover knowledge in ways and with scope and scale that was unfathomable before Google. Google has undoubtedly expanded our access to knowledge that can be experienced on a screen, or even processed through algorithms, or mapped. Yet Google has also made us careless too, or stupid when, for instance, Google driving directions don’t get us to the right place. It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it’s even alienated us from the physical world itself — from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing and tasting life. From looking into someone’s eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it’s made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It’s enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.” — Andrew Nachison, co-founder, We Media

A final thought: Maybe Google won’t make us more stupid, but it should make us more modest.

•  “There is and will be lots more to think about, and a lot more are thinking. No, not more stupid. Maybe more humble.” — Sheizaf Rafaeli, Center for the Study of the Information Society, University of Haifa

Read more about responses to other “tension pairs” tested in the survey as well as a more complete description of the survey methodology and respondents at pewinternet.org.

Also view detailed results from the first three “Future of the Internet” surveys.

_{1. Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was published in the summer of 2008, not the summer of 2009 as this report originally stated.}

With swine flu the top topic on the public’s mind last week, local television news stations and cable news networks remained the most frequented sources of information for Americans (cited as a news source on the subject by 69% and 63%, respectively). But the latest Pew Research News Interest Index survey also finds that about half the public (49%) turned to the internet for information about the virus. Moreover, asked which news source had been most useful in this regard, 25% of respondents named the internet, putting it at the top of the list of information sources in terms of utility. Which websites were the most frequented sources?

Health information sites on the internet are numerous and popular. A September 2008 report by the web-tracking service comScore, Inc. found that the health website category grew by 21% in terms of visits over the preceding year, more than four times as fast as total internet usage. But individual private health sites do not appear to have been the primary recourse of swine flu fact-seekers. When in search of flu facts — or, indeed, of ailment-related information generally — the experts say that most people start with … a search. “Google is the top “health” site on the internet because of the long tail of health questions,” says Susannah Fox, associate director for digital strategy at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Our data consistently finds that people start their health inquiry at a general search site.”

This phenomenon is amply illustrated by Google’s own search trend tracking. Much like Pew Research’s News Interest Index poll, the graph, tracking the volume of Google searches within the United States during the past 30 days, shows a sharp spike in swine flu interest over the last week in April (far steeper than interest in either Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who announced his resignation that week, or in Chrysler, which filed for bankruptcy), with a fairly rapid dropoff in interest at the start of May.

This pattern is also reflected in Google Insight’s listing of top searches, which show the terms “swine flu symptoms” and “swine flu” topping the list of “rising searches” — first and second respectively — over the last 30 days, beating even Susan Boyle and the Kentucky Derby in their rate of increase The federal CDC (Centers for Disease Control) comes in at fifth place, with the pattern of searches, as shown by Google Insight, closely tracking that for “swine flu” searches generally:

_{Web Search Volume: cdc+centers for disease control. United States, Last 30 days.}

Having searched, where does the public next turn? According to Bill Tancer, general manager for global research for Hitwise (which tracks the daily interactions between 10 million U.S. internet users and more than 1 million websites), the top 10 sites actually visited after searches on “swine flu” (for the four weeks ending 5/2/09) were the following¹:

1. www.cdc.gov
2. www.wikipedia.org
3. News.google.com
4. News.yahoo.com
5. www.myspace.com²
6. www.cnn.com
7. www.yahoo.com
8. www.pandemicflu.gov
9. www.facebook.com
10. www.who.int

The prominent position of the CDC on these lists may be owing in substantial part to the government’s earlier recognition of the usefulness of Google search tools in tracking the actual spread of diseases. Google’s Flu Trends tracks certain search terms to estimate possible flu activity at a state level – and it does this far more quickly than the CDC’s standard surveillance system can. Google shared its data with the CDC during the 2007-2008 flu season and analysis has shown that the near real-time search data were remarkably accurate in tracking the actual outbreak of cases across the country over the last five years. The website iHealthBeat reports that Google hopes to map other diseases worldwide in the future.

This year, as reported recently in the Washington Post and National Public Radio, the federal government made explicit use of the internet to disseminate information about the flu virus. According to the Post, CDC’s YouTube video, “Swine Flu,” had been viewed nearly 170,000 times by the end of April. CDC has also posted regular alerts on its Twitter account, CDCemergency, which currently has more than 106,000 followers.³

CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services also hosted an hour-long town hall meeting on their respective websites while staff members tracked public reactions on various social networking sites. And Google itself prominently displays an advisory telling users to consult CDC for the most recent official updates on swine flu, while CDC itself has an informational flu prevention posting in the margin of the Google Flu Trends page.

Goggle Trends show no surge in searches for popular privately run health information websites such as WebMd. But frequent users of such sites are likely to access them directly. And a Hitwise analysis shows that while most of these health-information websites show no clear uptick in visits as concern about the swine flu peaked, WebMd, the most popular of the group, showed a sharp increase in the frequency of visits. Moreover, Tancer’s review of the top search terms sending traffic to WebMd for the week ending May 2, 2009, shows that queries relating to swine flu symptoms are the most common on the list.

You can find more about the interaction of health and the internet at pewinternet.org.

_{1. Searches over the same period for the term “H1N1″ — the official name for swine flu — yielded a roughly similar, though slightly more academically-oriented list: 1.www.wikipedia.org; 2. www.cdc.gov; 3.News.google.com; 4.www.fas.org; 5.Jama.ama-assn.org; 6. www.facebook.com; 7. www.yahoo.com; 8. Environment.guardian.co.uk; 9. www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov; 10. www.bloomberg.com.}

_{2. Tancer notes that the frequency of social networking websites may be inflated by noise in the data resulting from the association of search terms with websites based on the sequence of visits, i.e. if a user, in a multi-tab environment, makes a swine flu query, than flips over to a social net site before reviewing the results of the search, the query may be incorrectly associated with the networking site.}

_{3. The current count of followers is considerable higher than the 45,000 reported by the Post as recently as April 30. The website XKCD provides additional insight into ways in which Twitter can enable you to watch uninformed panics unfold live.}

The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%).

With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet’s all-time killer app.¹ Underscoring the dramatic increase over time, the percentage of internet users who search on a typical day grew 69% from January 2002, when the Pew Internet & American Life Project first tracked this activity, to May 2008, when the current data were collected. During the same six-year time period, the use of email on a typical day rose from 52% to 60%, a growth rate of 15%.

These new figures propel search further ahead of the pack, well in front of other popular internet activities, such as checking the news, which 39% of internet users do on a typical day, or checking the weather, which 30% do on a typical day.

This chart shows the percentage of internet users who did these activities “yesterday,” which in a tracking survey like this one yields a picture of the “typical day” online. For most people the average day includes lots of emails (60% of internet users), general searches (49%), and news reading (39%) if they are online at all (30% of internet users are offline on a typical day).

Who is Making Search a Habit?

Those who are using search engines on an average day are more likely to have higher education and incomes, be internet users with at least six years of online experience and to have their homes wired for fast internet connections. Younger internet users are more likely than older users to search on a typical day and men are more likely than women to do so.

Education: Internet users with higher levels of education are more likely to use search on a typical day, with those having at least some college education significantly more likely to do so than those with less education:

Income: Internet users living in higher-income households are more likely to use search on a typical day, with those having an income higher than $50,000 per year being significantly more likely than those with lower incomes:²

Broadband Use: Those who use broadband connections at home are significantly more likely than those who use dial-up to have ever tried using search engines, by a margin of 94% to 80%. They are dramatically more likely to search on a typical day, and this difference persists when other factors, such as age and education, are held constant. These are the percentages according to type of internet connections for those who search on a typical day:

Age: Younger internet users have been consistently more likely to search on a typical day over the last five years of survey research. Here are the percentages of searchers in different age groups who search on a typical day:

Gender: While just about equal numbers of men (91%) and women (88%) report having ever used search engines at all, men are significantly more likely than women to search on a typical day.

Data collected since 2002 show that men who use the internet have consistently been more likely than women to integrate search into their daily lives. The percentage of online men who search on a typical day has risen steadily from 33% in 2002 to 53% currently. The percentage of women has also risen, increasing from 25% in 2002 to 45%.

Data from past surveys also suggest that men have been more engaged with search in general.³ Online men report searching more frequently and express greater confidence in their search abilities (although women have reported being equally successful in getting satisfying search results). Men have also been more aware than women of some of the controversial issues surrounding search, e.g., the existence of paid as well as unpaid search results, and the differences between the two.

Why Are More Internet Users Now Integrating Search into Their Online Activity?

While the number of internet users who search on a typical day has been steadily rising, this is the second time since the Pew Internet Project began tracking search engine use that we have seen a demonstrable leap in the numbers. The first came in late 2005, when the percentage of users searching on a typical day rose from about 30% (in June 2004) to about 40% (in September 2005). We speculated at that time about a few possible reasons behind the increase, pointing out that it was a time of much media coverage and buzz about search engine companies, including the Google IPO.⁴

Now, the percentage of users searching on a typical day has risen again, from about 40% to 49%. What has changed in the search world that might account for this increase?

One likely reason is that users can now expect to find a high-performing, site-specific search engine on just about every content-rich website that is worth its salt. With a growing mass of web content from blogs, news sites, image and video archives, personal websites and more, internet users have an option to turn not only to the major search engines, but also to search engines on individual sites, as vehicles to reach the information they are looking for.

Another reason may be related to the fact that fully 55% of American homes have a high-speed internet connection.⁵ Of all the demographic variables we analyzed, the presence of a home broadband connection had the strongest relationship with a user’s propensity to use a search engine on a typical day. Previous studies have shown that when a user upgrades to home broadband, she is more likely to turn to the internet first when she has a question — and now she is increasingly likely to employ a search engine to find the answer.

Finally, it may be that general search engine sites have become so useful and well tuned that people turn to them for an increasingly broad range of questions.

Find the survey questionnaire and topline responses at pewinternet.org.

Notes

¹ The most recent numbers for those who use email on a typical day comes from a PIP survey conducted December 2007.

² Twenty percent of respondents refused to answer or answered “don’t know” to the income question.

³ “Search Engine Users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naive” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, January 2005)

⁴ “Search engine use shoots up in the past year” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, November 2005)

⁵ “Home Broadband 2008” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 2, 2008)

The vast array of data points that make up “personal information” in the age of online media are nearly impossible to quantify or neatly define. Name, address, and phone number are just the basics in a world where voluntarily posting self-authored content such as text, photos, and video has become a cornerstone of engagement in the era of the participatory Web.

The more content we contribute voluntarily to the public or semi-public corners of the Web, the more we are not only findable, but also knowable.

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint.

Unlike footprints left in the sand at the beach, our online data trails often stick around long after the tide has gone out. And as more internet users have become comfortable with the idea of authoring and posting content online, they have also become more aware of the information that remains connected to their name online.

Nearly half of all internet users (47%) have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22%, as reported by the Pew Internet Project in 2002. Younger users (under the age of 50) are more prone to self-searching than those ages 50 and older. Men and women search for information about themselves in equal numbers, but those with higher levels of education and income are considerably more likely to monitor their online identities using a search engine.

Few monitor their online presence with great regularity.

Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 22% say they search using their name “every once in a while.” Three-quarters of self-searchers (74%) have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Most internet users are not sure exactly what personal information is available online:

• Roughly one third of internet users say the following pieces of information are available online: their email address, home address, home phone number, or their employer. One quarter to one third of internet users say they do not know if those data points are available online.
• One quarter of internet users say a photo, names of groups they belong to, or things they have written that have their name on them appear online.
• Few internet users say their political affiliation, cell phone number, or videos of them appear online.

In interviews with the Pew Internet Project, privacy advocates and professional researchers argued that many of these data points are indeed available about most people, either on the open Web or in select online databases.

Most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information.

Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online.

Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online. Just 38% say they have taken steps to limit the amount of online information that is available about them.

Online adults can be divided into four categories based on their level of concern about their online information and whether or not they take steps to limit their online footprint:

• Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online adults. They say they do not worry about the availability of their online data and actively upload content, but still take steps to limit their personal information. Young adults are most likely to fall into this group.
• The Concerned and Careful fret about the personal information available about them online and take steps to proactively limit their own online data. One in five online adults (21%) falls into this category.
• Despite being anxious about how much information is available about them, members of the Worried by the Wayside group do not actively limit their online information. This group contains 18% of online adults.
• The Unfazed and Inactive group is the largest of the four groups — 43% of online adults fall into this category. They neither worry about their personal information nor take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online.

Internet users have reason to be uncertain about the availability of personal data; 60% of those who search for their names actually find information about themselves online, but 38% say their searches come up short.

The majority of internet users who have the inclination to query their names with a search engine do find some relevant results (60%), but a sizable segment (38%) report that a simple search does not yield any information connected to their name.

Among those who have searched for their name online, 62% find that the amount of relevant information about them generally matches their expectations. One in five self-searchers (21%) are surprised by how much information they find online about themselves, while 13% express disbelief at how little information comes up in their results.

• Fully 87% of self-searchers who locate information connected to their name say that most of what they find is accurate, up significantly from the 74% who reported this five years ago.
• In contrast, 11% of self searchers who find information about themselves online say that most of it is not accurate, down from 19% five years ago.
• Just 4% of all online adults say they have had bad experiences because embarrassing or inaccurate information was posted about them online.

One-in-ten internet users have a job that requires them to self-promote or market their name online.

While most Americans do not actively manage their online presence, a segment of internet users have jobs that require them to market their name on the internet or make information about themselves available online. As one might expect, those motivated by work-related expectations are much more likely to use a search engine to track their digital footprints.

• Those with the highest education levels report a greater tendency towards managing their professional presence online. Fully 18% of working college graduates report that their employer expects some form of self-marketing online as part of their job, compared with just 5% of working adults who have a high school diploma.
• Employees who are required to market themselves online are far more likely to monitor their presence with a search engine. Fully 68% of these “public personae” use a search engine to look up their own name, compared with just 48% of employed internet users who are not required to market themselves online as part of their job.
• One-in-five working American adults (20%) say their employer has a special policy about how employees present themselves online — including what can be shared and posted on blogs and other websites.

Among adults who create social networking profiles, transparency is the norm.

The Pew Internet Project has reported extensively on teenagers’ use of social networking websites, finding that 55% of online teens have created an online profile and that most restrict access to them in some way. Looking at adults, their use of social networking profiles is much lower (just 20%), but those who use the sites appear to do so in a more transparent way.

• Among adult internet users who maintain an online profile, 82% say that their profile is currently visible compared with 77% of online teens who report this.
• Among adults who say they have a visible profile, 60% say that profile can be seen by anyone who happens upon it, while 38% say their profile is only accessible to friends.
• Teens with visible profiles make more conservative choices with respect to visibility; just 40% said their profile was visible to anyone, while 59% reported access that was restricted to friends only.

More than half of all adult internet users have used a search engine to follow others’ footprints.

When asked about eight different groups of people one might search for online — ranging from family and friends to romantic interests and business colleagues — 53% of adult internet users said they had looked for information connected to at least one of these groups.

• Most are casually curious in their searches for others. Just 7% of those who have searched for information on key people in their lives report doing so on a regular basis.
• Users are most likely to search for someone they have lost touch with. Fully 36% of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to find information about someone from their past.
• 19% of adult internet users have searched for information about co-workers, professional colleagues or business competitors.
• 11% of adult internet users say they have searched online for information about someone they are thinking about hiring or working with.
• 9% of online adults say they have searched online for information about someone they are dating or in a relationship with. Perhaps due to safety concerns, online women tend to do their dating homework more than online men.

Basic contact information tops most searchers’ wish lists.

Despite all the new forms of personal information available online, the most popular type of “people search” relates to finding someone’s contact information, like an address or phone number.

• 72% of people searchers have sought contact information online.
• 37% of people searchers look to the Web for information about someone’s professional accomplishments or interests.
• 33% of people searchers have sought out someone’s profile on a social and professional networking site.
• 31% have searched for someone’s photo.
• 31% have searched for someone else’s public records, such as real estate transactions, divorce proceedings, bankruptcies, or other legal actions.
• 28% have searched for someone’s personal background information.

The number of internet users who go online to look for information about a place to live has grown steadily over the past six years. Now, nearly two in five adult internet users in the U.S. (39%) have done this, up from 34% in 2004 and 27% in 2000.

This means that overall, more than a quarter of all adults in the U.S. (27%) have looked online for information about housing, double the overall number of Americans who had done so in 2000 (13%).

Also, more than half (51%) of the youngest adult internet users, 18 to 29 years old, have searched online for housing information. This compares with 43% of internet users 30-to-49 years old; 27% of internet users ages 50 to 64; and 15% of internet users ages 65 and older.

Perhaps reflecting their transient stage of life as well as their remarkably intensive use of the internet, 9% of online Americans ages 18 to 29 reported in August that they looked for housing information on a typical day, more than double the percentage (4%) in this age group who said the same thing two years earlier.

Two other characteristics of internet users are associated with the likelihood of looking online for information about places to live: the number of years they have been internet users and the type of internet connection they have at home. Those who have been online six years or more are significantly more likely than shorter-time users to have done this: 45% of these veteran users have looked online for housing information; compared with 30% of those who have been online 4-5 years; 24% of those online for 2-3 years; and 22% of those online one year or less. In addition, 45% of those with broadband connections at home have looked online for housing information, compared with 30% of those with home dial-up connections.

Among the factors related to the likelihood of looking online for a place to live, youth is a stronger predictor than connection speed or years of online experience.

Read the full report