Being a sometime dive down the rabbit hole of the craft and business of writing.
I wrote a piece about research rabbit holes a minute ago (in Internet time, anyway) when researching Abduction of a Slave (Isis4, publishing in January 2025), and it crystalized a realization that has been coming on slowly over, oh, say the last year or so.
Googling is starting to suck.
Kate Shugak knew this before I did. In Restless in the Grave (Kate19) one of the characters says Bill’s Bar and Grill in Newenham is better than Google at getting the news out. In Not the Ones Dead (Kate23) Kate misses a vital clue because she doesn’t go past the first page of Google results. In her defense she never had to before; for a long time the first ten hits were all you needed. Hell, the first three.
That isn’t true anymore. The first search hits on any topic are almost always sponsored; i.e., someone paid to place them there at the top of the page. A Google search has become indistinguishable from a product search on Amazon–vendors pay to have their products be the first thing you see.
I understand that all these Internet billionaires want to become trillionaires and the way to do that is to monetize their service. Okay, I get it, I’m a capitalist, too. (Although there are times when I want to say to these guys, “Dudes, seriously, how much is enough?)
I have a duty to my publisher to get books in on schedule so my fans can read them and I don’t have time to dick around sifting through Google search results. So now, in the menu bar of my browser (which, yes, is still Chrome, for now) I have a direct link to Wikipedia. I have another to Merriam-Webster. There’s a third to Alaska 511, the Alaska Troopers’ Daily Dispatch page, by far and away a better source than any Google search for criminal activities in Alaska.
I’m thinking about adding a link to the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (thinking because there is only so much space on that bar), and I’ve checked out the search functions on Smithsonian and National Geographic, which I don’t find quite up to speed, yet. (Try searching Wrangell-St. Elias Park on the latter. Much better to go directly to the NPS page.) The New York Times has digitized its entire morgue and when I had to look up the history of sewing machines I found a NYT article on the topic from 1860. Subscription required of course, but worth it. They are the nation’s paper of record and there is 175 years’ worth of searchable reporting waiting to be mined.*
The Internet is still a wide and wonderful place. Don’t let any one search engine curate it for you.
* Google “how much is a nyt digital subscription” and take a look at the results. Then come back here and tell me in the comments how much you think it is and where you found it.
#thiswritinglife Abduction of a Slave Isis4 kateshugak Not the Ones Dead restless in the grave