Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Is the Web Dead or Are Legal Nurse Consultants Using It Differently?

Wired magazine recently posed the question of whether the Web is dead or not. Based on my own (I’m hoping not atypical) behavior I’m starting to think like a Monty Python movie character. Although the Web may be circling the drain, it will probably tell you, “I’m not dead yet.”

I don’t mean we don’t use the Web anymore. I mean we use it differently than we did right after Al Gore “created” the information superhighway. Let’s be honest, when was the last time you sat down and just plain “Googled” something? Unless you’re doing a background check on a prospective blind date or researching an attorney-prospect for your legal nurse consulting business, I’m willing to wager it’s been a while.

According to Fortune magazine Google’s search growth has gone flat, which means they have to find new forms of advertising revenue. This accounts for Google’s movement into television (Google^® TV), productivity software (Google Apps), videoconferencing (Google Video Chat) and everything else you can think of (I wish they’d come up with Google Fridge so I could quickly locate tasty snacks hidden behind the tofu and Vickie’s Fage Greek yogurt.

Pure unadulterated search is what we originally did on the Web – back when it was a brave new World Wide Web. Today though, most Certified Legal Nurse Consultants I’ve talked to seem to rely on the bookmarks in their browsers to find what they need. Now, we spend time searching on sites, not on search sites. The Web itself is not to blame – it’s Google, Microsoft^®, Yahoo!^® and other search companies (at least those who haven’t been bought by Google) who bear the burden of rendering themselves obsolete.

They made it easy for us, too easy in fact, by allowing us to aggregate the information we need in one place, without needing to search for it. I’ve blogged about customizing my iGoogle homepage to deliver newsfeeds via RSS so that when I go to Google I can instantly see what’s right with the world, catch up on litigation trends and check the weather. My Yahoo! homepage has feeds from my favorite blogs as well as the feeds from NIH and the stock market. Across the top of my Firefox browser, I have bookmarks to my essential websites (like Vickie’s Blog, Amazon and our LegalNurse.com websites) so that with a simple click of my mouse, I can go anywhere I wish, all within my own clearly defined small Web world.

Beside those bookmarks, which limit my travels by only opening one page at a time, I use a cool little Firefox add-on called Morning Coffee. This instant add-on, with one click on the coffee cup icon, opens five or six other web pages all at once and allows me to survey even more territory without search effort. I don’t even visit Weather.com anymore because I’ve got the 1-Click Weather browser add-in that tells me what’s going on outside and what I can expect tomorrow. In other words, I use Google and Yahoo! for news and information – not search. I don’t see their ads and they’ve defeated their core purpose by making it so easy to learn what I want without searching.

In fact, I don’t have the luxury of search. If you’re a busy Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, unless you’re researching a specific topic, you probably don’t either. When you are researching for your latest case, you’re not Googling, you’re probably clicking on a bookmark to go to your favorite research site and searching there, not sorting through the first 10 of 1,149,134 results on Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Admit it – you spend more time on Medline, YouTube and Facebook than you do on Google. You probably don’t even search on eBay. I’ll bet you’ve saved your eBay searches as bookmarks. Some of you have even downloaded a dashboard like Tweetdeck to help you keep track of your Certified Legal Nurse Consulting colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

If you’ve followed my Tech Tips, you’ve customized your own Google and Yahoo! homepages to add in the news feeds necessary for your legal nurse consulting business. You’ve also probably added your favorite bookmarks to the top of your browser. And, if you’re like me, you don’t even use that goofy search box that somehow got accidently added to the top of your browser (you don’t need it). If I need to search I’ll do so simply by typing what I’m looking for into the URL address portion of my Firefox browser and let it pull up the search results. (Yes, they come from Google since I’ve set it as my default search tool, but I don’t go to Google first.)

So, my CLNC^® amigos, I ask you, is the Web dead or have we simply changed how we use it? Has the fun worn off and has it become less of an information superhighway or simply a means to visit your favorite LOLcat site? Do you habitually visit only favored sites or do you still surf? If you do search, is it within certain sites like NIH, YouTube or CDC? Comment and tell me how you use the Web and how your online behavior has changed, if at all.

Keep on techin’,
Tom