A Wall Street Journal article (link via Fimoculous.com) examines the “second-generation” impact of search engine technology: “When Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. “Justin and I wanted our son’s name to be as special as he is,” she explains.In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that’s becoming an especially tall order for those with common names.” Incidentally, I’m Google’s numero uno “Shane Barry” and the name’s apparently common as muck. (Fragile ego alert.)But seriously folks, my main concern with Google’s impact is that I think I now make far less of an effort to remember things with clarity. Just as spell-checking has undermined my already fairly shaky orthographic skills, my poor recall of names (particularly people’s names) and titles is deteriorating (a word, incidentally, that took me three attempts to get right) thanks to Google’s Do you mean…? feature. A few vague stabs at the half-forgotten name plus a few “+” signs to narrow the results is now usually enough to retrieve the obscure object that was half-desired. Perhaps, in 20 years’ time, search engines will be able to respond to hazy specifications along the lines of “You know, yer man who was in that show, you know the one…”.

The world of Idiocracy may be closer than we think.