I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in school we had to memorize stuff, but now I can find basically any answer in seconds on my phone. Does actually knowing things still matter, or is it enough to just know how to find information? My friends seem to think memory is useless now.
The premise flips cause and effect - you can only Google effectively if you already know enough to recognize a good answer when you find it. I learned this the hard way when I tried to troubleshoot why an aquarium filter kept clogging after just a few days. I could find dozens of results online, but without understanding water flow dynamics, substrate grain size, and biological load, I couldn't tell which advice actually fit my situation. Someone with real knowledge of filtration would've spotted the problem in seconds; I wasted weeks chasing red herrings because I didn't know what questions to ask or which answers made sense. Google is fantastic for looking up a specific fact you've forgotten, but it's terrible for learning something new or making good decisions under uncertainty.
Don't fall into thinking that Googling replaces actual knowledge - there's a huge difference between finding an answer and understanding it well enough to use it, connect it to other ideas, or spot when something's wrong. When you actually know stuff, you make better decisions faster, you can think critically about what you find online, and you're not completely lost the moment your internet goes down or you need to adapt information to a new situation.
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