aeblog

the google originality test

I take some strange sense of pride in being a collector of little bits of originality. Whenever I come up with an idea or phrase or something cool that I am excited about, I immediately wonder if it is an original idea. I am a bit obsessed, it seems. So I do what everybody nowadays does: I google it.

I think I put an inordinate amount of stake in the results. I don't know why I figure that any idea anyone has done anything with will be posted online in some format, but I seem to feel this way. Searching for something and coming up blank is a good feeling and gives me the right to lay claim, in some odd way, to whatever words I was searching on. Take 'mindful of colors', for example. I googled that phrase and got very few results. I quickly determined that though the phrase had been used a few times before, it was somehow original enough to me that I could feel good about myself. This seems weird somehow. I mean, I certainly want to be original in my thoughts and hate it when I come up with something I think is new only to find out that it has been done by a hundred other people, but what have I really determined with my googling?

If I come up with something influenced in no way by previous incarnations of the same or similar idea, does that make it original? I would say emphatically NO. I guess it is still original to me, but I cannot lay any claim in the broader context; my timing was off. It's like the two scientists laboring in two different labs half way around the world from each other who end up making the same ground-breaking discovery unbeknownst to each other. I have learned from this interesting article on Simultaneous Discovery, that Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone simultaneously, and that the reason we have Baby Bells now and not Baby Grays is thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So is google really a good test of originality? I'm not sure, but in this modern day, it certainly is a hell of a lot easier than it used to be to explore the tomes of what the rest of humanity is doing. Or at least the rest of humanity that is on the internet...