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Google Makes You Smarter
Nicholas Carr once wrote a long, long article claiming Google makes you stupid. Guess what? He was wrong. A new UCLA study says Google makes you smarter. No, it doesn’t just make you look smart in chat — it actually exercises your brain.
“There’s so much interest in exercising our minds as we age,” said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active.”
To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.
Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small’s study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Note that it’s the tech-savvy users who get the biggest brain boost from search. The study proves something else we’ve known all along: put a n00b in front of a computer, and he’s still a n00b.
YouTube Confirms Search Ads
In August, we noticed YouTube creators buying search ads on YouTube that click through to their own videos or channels. YouTube just confirmed the practice.
Type “Tina Fey†into YouTube’s search box and, along with the search results, you may find a somewhat relevant ad for the movie “W†as well as a significantly less relevant ad for the University of Phoenix. (This is a test, after all.) The “W†ad links to a trailer on YouTube for the Oliver Stone movie and the University of Phoenix ad links to that school’s YouTube channel.
For now, only a small number of advertisers is testing the new format, the latest of many that YouTube has experimented with in the past several months.
This is merely a natural progression from Google AdWords, and it’s been visible to the public for over a month now, so I’m surprised it took YouTube this long to talk about it. Time for YouTube creators to start consulting with keyword advertising gurus.
