I suppose it was only a matter of time before I missed a post. I’m glad I’d done twenty-seven days before it happened. I wrote a few weeks ago about the idea of ‘dailyish’ habits, which I thought at the time was a more realistic approach to my New Year’s writing resolution, but with each passing day the satisfaction was keeping me going and yesterday’s omission was a genuine case of being too busy and distracted with good things, rather than forgetting amidst slothful torper. I intend to get back on the writing wagon, so today this will be the first of two posts…
I was walking home from Friendship Heights this morning and decided to walk via Reno Road. Partly because this would allow me to call into Politics & Prose, a quite wonderful bookshop, and partly because I enjoy getting off DC’s main radical roads like Wisconsin Avenue and having a nosey at the varying styles of American houses. Reno Road is exceptional for at least one reason, or I should say I know of only one reason which makes it exceptional (I’m sure there are more) – the road is winding.
You do not find many winding roads in DC which, like most American cities, complies to a strict grid structure. In fact, by American standards, DC already stands out, with its traditional grid system interrupted by those radial roads emanating out from the downtown and stretching like tentacles out towards the Capital Beltway. For whatever reason, Reno Road winds its way through the Northwest of DC, with the straight on-grid roads dissecting it along its course.
I can while hours away in a good bookshop and Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue is an excellent one. I did have a fleeting thought not to call in, as I’m always conscious of my to-read pile, which itself has been recently added to considerably by the arrival of my shipping from the UK. I reckoned I could just have a browse though and would just have to be brave enough to leave before temptation took over. Unsurprisingly for a capital city bookstore, there are plenty of politics books. It is a bookstore for intellectual heavyweights as well as casual readers. Today though, I found myself meandering from section to section: history, sport, travel, cookery and the new non-fiction shelves.
The store also have a very good selection of magazines. Most of the titles have a little blurb added, describing the contents and noteworthiness of the periodical. I’ve always enjoying finding new magazines to keep me entertained and it reminded me of Borders bookstores, which had a huge selection of magazines. Here in the States, it is hard to find a good selection outside of airports and train stations. Even in supermarkets, which in the UK are normally good carriers of magazines, any shelves given over to print media tend to me the magazine books or special editions which can stay on-sale for longer periods, rather than regular weekly or monthly titles.
Eventually I mustered the courage to leave without buying anything. Continuing back down Reno, I thought of all the different books that I’d looked at and it reminder me of the phrase ‘intellectual butterfly’. I couldn’t remember where I’d come across it, or whether it’s one of those phrases that had popped into my head and then I’d seen it later, defeating any sense of originality. I’m not sure whether it is a compliment or a criticism. The idea of fluttering from idea to idea probably has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, it reminds me of the central theory of David Epstein’s book Range about the success of generalists. On the other hand, it seems like an alternative to ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ – rarely used solely to compliment someone.
When I got home, I wanted to find out other uses and users of the phrase ‘intellectual butterfly’. My starting point for this, like most people, is a quick web search. Some time ago, I switched my default search engine on my laptop from Google to DuckDuckGo. It was recommended to me by a friend who is very conscious of personal data and he said DuckDuckGo has a good reputation for respecting user’s data. Sadly, I’m not the biggest fan. Maybe I’m used to Google, but I often find myself quite disappointed by the results which DuckDuckGo churns out. So much so, I frequently redo the search on Google. In reality, I should probably just switch my default back.
I did a search for ‘intellectual butterfly’, defaulting to DuckDuckGo and then, as suggested above, ran the search again on Google. I don’t think I’d ever properly compared the results before, I’d just abandoned one and moved on. This time I scanned through both sets of results. The top ten results on each site did not have a single find in common. Google’s results were dominated by social media and sales. DuckDuckGo had a curious blend of websites about actual butterflies, together with one of two uses of the phrase. Looking across both sets of results, it’s fair to say that the phrase isn’t as common as I thought it might be, or at least not according to these two search engines.
I am not an expert on search engines and the programming which sits behind them. It intrigues me though that the two websites can yield such different results. Wanting to test this new curiosity of mine further, I decided to run another search. This time for the less obscure but still relatively random word: bonsai. This time shopping hits topped both sets of results, albeit not entirely the same shops and not in the same order. A website, Bonsai Empire, was near the top of both, but different positions. Interestingly, DuckDuck Go had a few more retailers in their top results whilst Google featured more links to dictionary definitions and encyclopaedia entries. Both search engines included a link for Wikipedia; for both engines, there is a dedicated side panel for the online encyclopaedia.
I guess this is really stating the obvious, but I’m sure other people had, just like me, maybe not consciously considered the implications for their choice of search engine. If I was researching a topic, especially a more obscure there, the diverging search engine results would take me in quite different directions. And yet, how often does someone doing research, or teaching other people how to research, think about using multiple search engines as part of their process. With ChatGPT and the following wave of AI increasingly becoming part of our lives, I guess this element of ‘research literacy’ or ‘web literacy’ is something we should pay more attention to. Regardless of whether there is an agenda behind the differing results or not, it is probably something we should take into account. Just as careful use of ChatGPT will be championed, we maybe need to revisit our use of Google Search and its peers too.
Commonplace 