So I was doing a search query today on Google and it didn’t find anything. That happens when you do very specific searches. Something caught my attention though. The “didn’t find anything” page said:
Your search ‘ “[search terms]” – did not match any documents.
I found it very interesting that Google decided to use the term ‘documents.’ When I search the web I usually think of searching for web pages, even though I do search for specific documents every once in a while.
My teachers always taught me that the information on the internet was unreliable. They NEVER described anything you found on the internet as a document. It was always a webpage, which carried a distinctly negative connotation to it. This may be because when I was going to school when the internet was first coming online, but even now teachers caution against citing anything on the internet as a source.
Do you think Google’s use of the word ‘document’ was on purpose? Is Google trying to redefine the definition of webpages or am I just reading too much into this? 
In reality a webpage is a document… but document sounds so much better to me…
One Comment
Tonight Google Operating System posted an interesting article about doing what’s important. At the end of that article they said:
I’m not sure how this fits in, but it seems to be important when thinking about ‘documents.’ Google realizes, perhaps, that the internet just needs to contain all the information. They use the term ‘documents’ do describe it all. Good/Bad, useful/useless, etc. etc.