We search for air fare tickets, celebrity gossip, the latest news, sports results and recipes. But what should we really spend our time searching for? We take a look at how the search engines tackle the major questions in life.

The Meaning of Life

We know its not fashionable, and that the latest reality shows are much more important. Still, once in a while, we should just stop, draw our breath and think: Why are we here? Are we here for a higher purpose: to learn, help, love? Or is it is up to us to embed our lives with meaning?

According to the top ranking site for the query on Google, the very unpretentious looking “The Meaning of Life”, reality is in fact “neither good nor bad, it is a very plastic inkblot sort of thing that can be bent and twisted in many directions depending on your beliefs.”

Live Search points to a Wikipedia article which lists a laaaarge number of possible answers including “to kill or be killed” or “to be a filter of creation between heaven and hell”.

This is definitely the kind of question where the search engines only can provide input, not any definite answer.

Love

Without love we are like stiff robots unable to take part in the dance of life. Some reduce love to hormones and chemicals, others believe it is a cosmic force that holds the universe together. What can the search engines tell us?

Yahoo! points to the Wikipedia . “Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive, much like hunger or thirst,” the article says, while “psychology depicts love as a cognitive and social phenomenon.”

This is all very well, but it doesn’t bring us closer to experiencing or understanding love. But then again, we should probably not expect an encyclopedia to help us find the poetry of life.

Google brings us to The Love Calculator, a very pink site dedicated to the inexact science of determining whether two persons fit together.

The chance of the married editors of Pandia succeeding in this area is a lousy 28 percent, the calculator says: “but a relationship is very well possible, if the two of you really want it to, and are prepared to make some sacrifices for it.”

Ask brings us another pink site, Love Poems And Quotes. Despite the horrible design and its many banners and pop ups, the site does contain some true gems, like “Grow old along with me
the best is yet to be” (Robert Browning). And you can’t go wrong with Paul: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Still, we have to conclude that the search engine algorithms cannot bring true wisdom to the top of their results.

Truth

The truth will set us free. But what is the truth? it is certainly not a one-to-one relationship to any objective reality, because all we believe are interpretations

Google brings up thetruth.com, as number one. This site has one mission: spread information about the tobacco companies and their deadly, addictive products — which is interesting, but not exactly what we were looking for.

Yahoo!, Ask and Gigablast bring up the exact same site as number one (which proves the theory that it helps to have a keyword as part of your site’s name. Whether “truth” is the first keyword that comes to mind when searching for tobacco related information is another matter).

Live, however, points us in the direction of the Wikipedia (again!!!), which says that “There is no single definition of truth about which the majority of scholars agree, and numerous theories of truth continue to be widely debated.”

So there you have it: You won’t find the truth on the Internet.

Freedom

Nazis, communists and Taliban supporters claim that freedom is a highly overrated concept and that life would be much easier if we all behaved in the same way as they do. Actually, history has proved that they do not make it any easier, they only take away our possibility to make things right.

The fact that the Chinese authorities spend so much time on restricting Internet communication, proves that the the search engines have become vehicles of freedom in and by themselves. But what do the search engines have to say about what freedom is and should be?

Ask lists a definition of freedom as number two: “Freedom is a mental condition-a condition of the spirit. All of us are free, if we but choose to acknowledge it.” This is good answer. But it is a spiritual definition of freedom, not a political one.

Google believes we are looking for furniture, and gives us Freedom Furniture and Homewares. (We are not complaining. It is very hard for a search engine to guess whether we are looking for information or for something to buy. One word queries are seldom recommended!).

However, the Wikipedia has the answer: “Political freedom is the right, or the capacity, of self-determination as an expression of the individual will,” it says, while philosophical freedom is “a many-faceted, positive term encompassing the ability to act consciously, in a well-balanced manner and with self control in a given constructive direction.”

Find yourself

The oracle in Delphi said that the way to wisdom was to “know thyself”. Religious mystics and modern psychologists agree on this: Much suffering is caused by the fact that we have too many blind spots and do not see our own weaknesses or strengths.

If you want to find yourself on the Internet, we guess the first thing you can do is to do a “vanity search”, i.e. search for your own name (unless your name is John Smith, Kim Li or Mr. Singh that is).

In the old days, two or three years ago, the main reason for doing a vanity search was to see if there was any slander outranking your own pristine site.

The young of today, however, may actually learn something about themselves by searching for their name using Google:

There is the flickr-photo from that party you cannot remember. There is that discussion forum entry where you made a total a.. of yourself back in 2002. Fortunately (?) there is also the love poem you wrote to your girl/boy friend during a hormone high at the age of 17.

Are the search engines able to tell us something sensible in general about “finding yourself”?

Google lists Quotations about Self-Discovery as number one. This site is actually quite good.

Here is a quote from Julien Green: “The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.”

Another one, from Thomas Szasz, seems to indicate that this is not so much a matter of finding yourself as of making your own life: “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.”

Aaah, one point to the search engines!