GO ONLINE: Baidu, the leading search engine in China, has become the main source for Chinese Internet users to get information (PEI XIN)

"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.

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 computers, 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."

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