It just occured to me that the way we potty-train small children so that they stop making messes, we also should train older children to look the stuff up instead of asking endless questions. More and more I find myself answering another question like Daddy, what is Cassinian Oval, with “lookitup”. And what better place there is than Google (with all caveats related to the safe search issues).

I even went as far as coining a term - “google-trained”, although in my case I send her to Encarta first. The thing is that google has already become synonymous with search (same as Xerox meant “to copy”). Training by the way includes an ability to recognize a potentially unsafe or junk result.

Are your children google-trained?