Hidden among all the News of the World scandal in the Daily Telegraph last Saturday was an article which claimed that using Internet search engines can harm your memory. A psychologist from Columbia University in New York has carried out a study which found that, due to the availability of information on the web, we tend to easily forget things that we know we can find again. We're rewiring our brains to remember where we can retrieve information online, rather than remembering the information itself.

With the #NoSearch project in mind, this made fascinating reading for me and seems to support some of my own key learnings. As the experiment has progressed I've, rather surprisingly, found myself asking fewer questions of my friends and networks when I fully expected to be asking more. In a sense, not using search engines has become easier as time has gone on. And it wasn't until I read the article in the Telegraph that it dawned on me why. It's because my recollection of information such as statistics and opinions has improved.

I, like most people, have become very accustomed to skim reading. For example, I currently receive anywhere between 50 and 100 blog posts in my RSS reader on any given day, of which I skim read maybe 10 per cent. Only if something grabs my attention do I read it fully. But over the last few weeks, if I find something interesting or useful I tend to recall it better; it's as if I've adjusted my habits and way of thinking to cope with the fact that I can't simply Google something if I forget it.

Psychologists believe that the Internet has become part of our 'transactive memory', information that we don't recall but know where to retrieve if we need it. Whether I'm now making more effort to remember information or whether I can change the way my brain works in just seven weeks I have no idea. But if this is the case, the implications for marketers are very clear - in order for your messages to be recalled, they have to be bold, clear and unforgettable!

This post has also appeared in CorpComms magazine.

Last week I spoke about the launch of Google+ in specific relation to search. Having had further time to reflect on this, I'm starting to think that regardless of whether or not Google+ is successful, it could very well reshape the way we use the social web.

The whole point of #NoSearch is to investigate collective intelligence and the power of social networks.  Not using search engines means that your online community becomes vital both for work and pleasure and, as a central tenet, Google+ is focused on creating very personalised and segmented networks according to your contacts' interests, your relationship with them and what you want them to see (and not to see). Whereas Facebook is opt-out, Google+ is opt in, and that represents a fundamental shift in social networking that, at present, some are struggling to get their heads around.

The ability to build a community around myself while undergoing #NoSearch, with different contacts and friends from different aspects of my life with different areas of interest all in one place, is huge. And while it may have come too late for this experiment, the implications for marketers are massive. If #NoSearch is teaching me one thing, it's that those using social media effectively truly thrive on their ability to harness collective intelligence and community.

From a business perspective, community is becoming more vital by the day. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+ are built around effectively managing huge amounts of real-time data generated by users on computers and mobile devices. If as a marketer you can get to grips with that and leverage it, you have a great competitive advantage.

So while the #NoSearch project may only be an experiment, it's proving to me that the wisdom of the crowd is more often than not far superior to the results you can get from a search engine. Google may have speed, but people have knowledge. And if Google can integrate Google+ with search, we're on the verge of a new era in the lifecycle of the web based around personalised communities.

This post has also appeared in CorpComms magazine.

The last week has been very interesting for someone who’s not conducting web searches but who works in social communications. The launch of Google+ has been met with predictable buzz and people like me will have spent many hundreds or thousands of hours playing with it over the last few days in order to try and suss it out. But while I’m not writing this to discuss Google+ (you can read my initial take on that here should you so wish), the newest and shiniest social platform has certainly impacted my #NoSearch project.

There are several huge advantages that Google has when it comes to gaining traction for Google+ (the Chrome browser, Gmail and, above all, the Android OS to name but three), but one that’s being overlooked by most at present is search itself. Search is Google’s heartland and there are reports that Google+ profiles are already showing prominently in the SERPs. And considering that Google holds around 80% of the search market, this has massive implications. It’s something I want to investigate more and get to grips with. And yet I can’t...

As far as I’m concerned, Google profiles suddenly jumping to the top of the search engines for those lucky enough to have a Google+ account is mere speculation. I can’t even tell you whether the +1 button now makes any sense in the SERPs. And that’s hugely frustrating. Of all the times that Google could launch its most exciting development in years, it would be smack bang in the middle of an experiment that intends to find out whether we can go without search engines.

It leads nicely to an area of thinking that I’ve been toying with since I started this; that of Google being akin to a form of ‘cult’. One of the things that defines a cult is the blind faith and unquestioning belief of its members. And when you carry out a Google search, do you not exhibit such traits? Do you consciously think about your search, or do you just do it? And 0.25 seconds later when you get the results, do you ever stop to question whether what you’re seeing really is the best that the internet has to offer on the subject, or whether the SERPs have been gamed by SEO professionals? Or do you just trust in them 100%?

I’m a huge fan of Google as a company, but #NoSearch is making me realise just how much power and influence it has in the way we perceive the world around us. And if Google+ catches the public imagination when it comes out of field trial, it’ll have even more so.

This post has also appeared in CorpComms magazine.

When you're not using an Internet search engine, your time online becomes valuable, as I've mentioned before. What used to take me seconds, now takes me minutes. And those minutes all add up. So the last thing I want to do, having found or been directed to a website via a source other than Google, Yahoo! or Bing, is to spend too much time trawling through it looking for the information I need. And this reveals quite a lot about online behaviour that marketers should take note of.

If you think about your own Internet habits, you almost certainly spend no more than a minute on any given website before you surf off somewhere else if you can't find what you're looking for. In fact, it's probably a lot less - I'm not sure what the average statistic is as I can't Google it!

And when you do go elsewhere, I expect you go back to your web search and pick up the next relevant site from the search engine results pages. At present, I can't do this and I know all too well that it will take me more valuable time to find another relevant information source. So I'm starting to really appreciate websites that have clear and easy navigation and, above all, an intra-site search function.

I've talked before about my new-found appreciation of social bookmarking, and one of the reasons for this is the ability to interrogate their databases of posts and pages using keyword tagging. Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg and the rest are experts at making information easy to find. Most standard websites, much less so.

Any decent web designer will consider on-site navigation as one of the major bedrocks of a site, but I think the rest of us tend to overlook this as it's rather intangible when compared to graphical design and content. But what #NoSearch is doing is magnifying and amplifying aspects of online behaviour that may not be new, but are extremely important and probably don't get enough consideration.

At the current time, I'd take a site with a decent intra-site search function and clear navigation structure that looks awful over a nicely-designed site with no search function at any time. And if my current behaviour is a more conscious and exaggerated version of my normal online habits, then chances are I do this without even thinking about it usually. So maybe it'd be good idea to check out your own site's navigation and add a search function pretty soon.

This post has also appeared in CorpComms magazine.

Up until now I’ve been concentrating solely on the impact on my professional life of quitting search engines in this column. But this week, I thought it’d be useful to take a look at the impact that this experiment is having on my use of the internet in my leisure time, and what we, as business communicators, can learn from this.

As it turns out, I don’t spend very much time online outside of work, which has kind of surprised me. And when I do, it’s invariably through my smartphone, accessing the web mostly via apps or, to a lesser extent, via direct bookmarks. I virtually never feel the need to use a search engine when I’m not in the office (or, at least, ‘at work’). And I’m left wondering whether this is the case for a lot of people?

There have only been a couple of occasions during the last three weeks that I’ve wanted to perform a Google search in my leisure time, and only one of these is significant enough to talk about from a marketing communications perspective.

My wife, daughter and I are booked to spend a week in a cabin in the New Forest at a place called Sandy Balls. Yeah, I know – I can’t say it without giggling either. Anyway, when it came to finding out more about the immediate area without the use of Google, I was a little stumped. (Although God knows what would come up if you searched for ‘sandy balls’ – I’m betting it’s got little to do with the New Forest.) Normally I’d have spent a good hour or two researching the area, what to do and where to go. But this time, I couldn’t. So I did what I’ve been doing throughout June and turned to social media.

What I found was a pleasant surprise. Sandy Balls has a Facebook page, and a pretty good Facebook page at that. The community is engaged; posting photographs and comments, and asking questions. And whoever runs the page is doing their best to keep it that way – they’re extremely responsive and they’re running promotions via the page (albeit technically against Facebook regulations but hey, what small businesses doesn’t).

So what are the outtakes from that? First, if you don’t have a Facebook page you might be missing out on the opportunity to inform, engage and influence your customers. OK, so that’s not rocket science, but this is a real world example where a small business is doing a great job of communicating with customers and potential customers. Had they not had a page, or had that page been awful, where would that have left me? Unimpressed and frustrated at the very least.  And second,  as I’ve said before, social communications enables you to go beyond search engines. It provides opportunities that SEO doesn’t at a fraction of the cost. If there’s one thing #NoSearch is teaching me it’s that, despite the pain of the time it takes to look information up without Google, the information that you find when you put that time in is often far superior. So if you’re using social media as a marketing tool, you must ensure what you’re doing really hits the mark.

This post has also appeared in CorpComms magazine.