The Two Most Underestimated Tools of the Internet

Since the birth of the internet there has have been a baby boom of websites to come into the world as we now know it. There are gaming sites, news sites, search engines, sex sites, and the list just goes on. Far to long for me to keep up with, if my mind can even handle such a number. But that’s not the point! The point is that there is such a vast number of websites out there, and the majority of people of this day and age do not truly take advantage of the unlimited resources at their very disposal. They would rather go out of their way and go to a store like Best Buy or Micro Center to get someone else' opinion on a subject they don’t know about then to research it on their own and collect their own point of view of that product or topic. So without further ado I give you the two most underestimated yet probably most used tools of the internet.

I am of course talking about YouTube and Google. These two websites make up for a huge fraction of the traffic that is the internet. When people get curious they say “I’m gonna google it!” or when they want to show a friend or family member a movie trailer or something so hilarious that it just simply can’t wait you whip out your iPhone or Android and pull YouTube up in a matter of seconds.

Before I jump into why I think that YouTube is one of the most underestimated tools of our time, let me just hit you with some statistics so you can wrap your head around just how big YouTube really is.

·         60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

·         Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day

·         Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month

·         Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube

·         More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years

Yeah, it’s that big. And that was just some of the stats about YouTube. People really need to learn how to properly harness the power of this site! Granted a lot of the videos are fake, and just because they are fake doesn’t mean that YouTube can pull them from the site. They have as much a right to post videos as you and I do. This is where internet experience comes into play. You need to know how to look at the comments, look at the like/dislike meter and determine for yourself if its legit or not. Now this is not hard to do, because people on the internet do not appreciate being hood winked by an internet troll who has nothing better to do then to post false videos. So with that being said, if its fake, it’s easy to tell.

One of the many reasons that I adore YouTube is because I have learned so much shit on that site that I feel like I don’t even need to go to school anymore (but still, stay in school kids). I have learned how to install a water cooler for my computer on YouTube, and thanks to FPSRussia I have learned way more then I should about guns. Even aside from the learning curve, it’s the ultimate gaming guide! Any video game you could possibly imagine is one there, with guides cheats and everything else you could possibly need to 100% your game. It really couldn’t be easier! 

So with all that out of the way, we now come to the next stop in our internet tour. Google. The internet giant that is just that much closer to world domination, next to Facebook that is. Google logs around 2 billion searches each day. So acting on that number that means that within the course of the year Google logs a grand total of 730 billion searches a year. That monstrous number looks like this if you actually want to write it out: 730,000,000,000. All people need to do in order to figure out how to change your own oil or how to tie a tie is simply Google it! 

I’m not sure what else there is to say on this subject. If you Google things that you need or want to know, odds are that the answer will be right in front of you 90% of the time. It’ll just take a little bit of concentration and a weather eye in order to find. 

The internet can be a very misleading and intimidating place to look around and to be entertained. However at the same time it can be extremely useful and is an excellent resource for just about anything you need to find out at a moment’s notice. To let the full potential of these tools go unused largely because people rather go into stores like Best Buy and Radio Shack.  It just takes some practice and you could be a pro in no time.