I've met lots of younger devs who have varying degrees of impostor syndrome, so anecdotes like this probably help people like that feel less bad about not knowing everything.
And from what I've seen, those who don't google consistently also fail to understand the answers they find when they do google things. It is, in fact, an essential skill.
As far as I can just about every search engine uses results from Google directly or indirectly by using a source like Bing that in turn gets some of their results from Google. If you won't call something a search engine unless it doesn't use anyone else's search results you might have a hard time naming more than one. You can't escape Google.
That being said, Google is also a good search engine, so it’s difficult to compete with them regardless of personalized results.
What "Google getting better" actually means is that it is more likely to return what most people want as the first page hits. That is a tradeoff, because it obscures everything else whenever what most people want is wrong.
As a programmer, you're only going to be doing searches for things that are non-obvious, so there is a vastly higher chance of Google giving you the wrong answer than for the average search.
There is a fundamental contradiction between a search engine that tries to show you only what it thinks you want, and the fact that you don't know exactly what you want when you search, until you see some results.
I think there's something like a conservation law, that the more you make it easy to find some things on the Internet, the harder you make it to find others. Kind of like the proof that you can't compress all strings.
I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.
I don't think he has books, but he has an enormous amount of documentation (something like the whole MSDN library, a bunch of internal documentation and reference info, and other documentation) installed on his computer.
I definitely had a lot of books, but actually the vast majority of my information came from man pages, RFCs and specs. I actually learned C++ by reading the spec -- I've never read any C++ book in my life, even though I was a professional C++ programmer for at least 10 years. For learning the STL, I did it by reading the source code!
Probably the biggest thing I miss in the age of Google is that offline documentation is getting hard to find. One of the reasons I chose Rust for my latest side project is that it's extremely easy to install offline information for virtually everything.
I like doing web searches searches and Stack Overflow is really stupendously awesome. Especially when I'm working in a new language or framework, I can find idiomatic solutions to problems without having to read through thousands of lines of source code. However, I do think that newer programmers today are missing out when they don't learn how to search primary sources to get their answers.
If you have a question about how the language works, it really does pay off to look at the spec. In doing so, you learn about things in a larger context. I'm always grateful for SO answers that have links to primary sources like specs in their answers, but I've noticed that my younger colleagues almost never click on those links. When they have the answer they want, they are back to their own code. Often they miss important nuances because they are too focused on getting the answer.
Similarly, I have found that there is often a huge reluctance to read source code. A colleague once joked that he used dependencies so that he didn't have to read the source code. It's funny because it's true ;-) However, if you at least try to answer your questions first by looking at the source code for a dependency, then it will tell you a lot about that dependency (mostly: OMG! We need to ditch this ASAP! ;-) )
I used to have a collection of hundreds of RFCs on my computer. Really, anything that is about the internet has an RFC (or did back in the day, anyway). These days, even I'm lazy and don't bother to maintain offline collections of this information. However, it is worrying that I often run into developers who build very complex internet applications and don't even know what an RFC is let alone use them to learn how they should build their systems. They will have very ingrained opinions on how build things, but they have no idea how the HTTP protocol works, for example. Discussions on the topic of how to design something usually results in snippets of blog posts obtained through Google searches, rather than pointing to the relevant RFC and saying, "It works like X so we need to do Y". Negotiation of how to proceed often involves considerable heated discussion about which notable internet pundit we should trust the most.
Yeah, this is an "old programmer rant" ;-) However, if I could wave a magic wand and get younger programmers to all add something to their arsenal of tricks it would be to read primary sources early and often.
I remember that. I think it was a combination of there not being good reference websites in some cases, not good question sites in others, and search engines generally being both less good and having less of those sites to index.
I specifically remember finding sites that were goldmines for certain topics, and hoarding them in my bookmark list of useful resources.
Fun times.
And just making the decision to type things into Google is far from the ability to search effectively. Increasingly search engines will converge on a bad answer for a given question because it's the most popular. You just cannot assume that the correct solution is going to be prominent, because once another one has critical mass, it cannot be dethroned. The result that sounds just barely plausible enough to fool the average person making the search (not the average programmer) wins, and often it's terribly wrong.
Really enjoy taking advantage of it and reassuring the younger kids (only two or three years younger than me) that they're more than capable of this shit. And it helps me be more confident when I'm at work - at school they see me as the guy with all the answers (ha, I wish - but it's a good reminder that we're all our own worst critics).