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Huang Juanin southwest China’s Chong qing Municipality hadn’t visited a hospital for years. Instead, she used Internet search engines to diagnose illnesses herself.
“By using search engines such as Google or Baidu, you can get almost all the information of a disease and a greater variety of treatment methods than what you can get from doctors,” Huang said.
Much like English-speakers instruct one another to “google it” for answers to all sorts of questions, Chinese netizens are also fond of using local search engine, Baidu, as an informal verb.
Everything was fine until May, when Huang developed a cough and a low fever. She submitted her symptoms as a Baidu search query, and diagnosed herself with a common cold. She then bought some cold medicine from a drug store, but her symptoms worsened. After a month, she finally visited a doctor, who told her she had bronchitis. What’s worse, the delayed diagnosis resulted in additional complications.
Liu Lianxing, a 24-yearold man in Chongqing, also preferred to check his symptoms online and make diagnoses by himself. In April, Liu suffered from nausea and vomiting as well as loose bowels after meals. He checked all these symptoms with a search engine and the results suggested the early symptoms of gastric cancer.
“This really freaked me out. I dared not go to hospital and thought I was going to die,”said Liu, who lost sleep and couldn’t concentrate on work. When a coworker finally dragged Liu to a doctor, he found out he just had chronic gastroenteritis.
“I will never trust search engines that much from now on,” Liu said. “Even if I don’t have any diseases, I might be frightened to trigger symptoms of one.”
Life Times, a major weekly public health publication, conducted a survey in 2009 on how many people would turn to search engines for diagnoses and treatments for diseases. The result showed that 64.76 percent of the respondents would go to search engines for treating methods and 56.3 percent said that they successfully cured minor diseases with answers from search engines.
Information overload
For Huang and Liu and many other netizens, search engines are not just used for checking medical information but almost everything they need in everyday life, such as how to cook, how to manage a tour and where to get cheaper commodities.
“It has almost everything, and sometimes the problem is that it answers too much,” said Zhang Lijun, a 25-year-old woman in Beijing.
Zhang once tried to find some tips to travel and shop in Hong Kong, and got thousands and thousands of results. “I spent almost a whole day searching it but still couldn’t decide where to go and what to do,” she said
Wu Xiaoli calls it a distraction. Wu works in a bank in Shanghai and admits she spends a lot of time on search engines but it is not highly efficient at all.
“It seems fast and covers all the information, but people easily get lost in the massive amount of information,” Wu said. “For example, when I checked comments of a cosmetic brand, I might find someone saying she tried this brand while she is in the process of losing weight and other people would ask her the effective ways to lose weight and I would follow that. Finally I even couldn’t remember what I originally wanted to check.”
Zhang once browsed a new skirt released by Chanel and discovered an actress had worn the same skirt. She ended up spending the next two hours streaming the actress’ latest movie.
But at the same time, Zhang also found out the information in search engines is more or less the same. “Every time when we need to hand in the annual summary, it turns out that almost everybody follows the same template they found online,” Zhang said.
“I don’t think we should blame search engines for that,” said Lu Bowei, a sophomore student at Shanghai-based Fudan University.“It is because users cannot control themselves. They can easily choose not to be distracted but they don’t.”
Lu admitted the students of his generation rely heavily on search engines. “I must admit it is difficult to imagine life without Baidu or Google,” Lu said. “If search engines were to disappear tomorrow, I would be lost.”
But Lu also has his problems. “It seems rather cliché to say that the ability to search electronic data fundamentally alters a person’s thought processes, but—in my case, at least—it’s true,” said Lu, who found himself increasingly reliant on search engines to find information that he would once have memorized.
“So sometimes I repeatedly check for the same thing. It is annoying,” Lu said.
Mei Shaozu, a professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing warns that overreliance on search engines can make people trust themselves less. “It is like when a person has a calculator at hand, he might not bother with doing even simple mathematics by himself,” he said.
GO ONLINE: Baidu, the leading search engine in China, has become the main source for Chinese Internet users to get information
Dependence
Responding to a survey conducted by China Youth Daily last year, 89.8 percent of people admitted that they were addicted to search engines. Among them, 20 percent said the addiction was very severe. People who said that they would go first to search engines when they came across questions accounted for 78.6 percent of the respondents, and only 8 percent said they would think by themselves.
As for the symptoms of search engine addiction, 70.7 percent said that they would search for background knowledge when they came across fields that they were unfamiliar with. And 38.5 percent said that when they tried to memorize something, they were inclined to memorize just the key words to later use in search queries.
According to You Tianyu, a consultant from Iresearch Group, a leading organization focusing on in-depth research in China’s Internet industry, search engines make people get easier access to information so that many people are more inclined to know a little bit of everything but stay at a very shallow level.
“We have a name for people like this: pancake people. They have a wide range of knowledge but it is very thin,” You said.“It seems we grasp much information, but most of the information is in the comput- ers, not in the brains.”
Search engines have become the basic tool of the Internet. Before that, people relied more on mass communication or interpersonal communication. In 2011, the number of search engine users reached 450 million in China and it is estimated that in 2014, the number will reach 600 million. With the increasing number of smart phone users, getting on the Internet has become even easier.“Now almost 60 percent of passengers in the subway stare at their smart phones the whole trip,” You said.
Why do people become addicted to search engines? According to a survey of netizens, 85.9 percent of the respondents said that searching online saves time, 61.8 percent believed they could get more accurate answers with the help of search engines, and 66 percent said that they didn’t want to think hard. Of all, 22 percent admitted that they didn’t want to communicate with other people, so search engines were very helpful.
But this leaves loopholes for fraudulent and inaccurate information to spread online as people easily get lost in the sea of information.
“Search engines are a double-edged sword,” said Huang Jianshi, a doctor at Peking Union Medical College Hospital. “It is indeed very convenient, but at the same time, it helps rumors and wrong information spread much faster.”
A woman surnamed Qian in Beijing is a victim of such false information. “I wanted to do double eyelid surgery and checked online. The first page of results was full of the advertisements for beauty clinics and it is very hard to tell which one is more reliable, because for each one there are some good comments and bad comments, so it is hard to choose,”said Qian, who finally got the surgery from a seemingly more reliable beauty clinic but was unsatisfied with the results. Qian had to go to Peking Union Medical College Hospital for a second surgery to fix it.
“It is the responsibility of the search engine providers to filter the information and stop spreading wrong information,” You said. “At the same time, people should learn to make judgments independently. Search engines are just tools that should be used by people, not vice versa.” n