Youth Information - more than Google & Co.

Earlier this year we had some interesting discussions at wienXtra-jugendinfo and together with the colleagues of the Austrian Network of Youth Information Centers: What has Youth Information to offer compared to search engines like Google?

First of all we agreed, that a Youth Information Center is not a search engine. :-)

Search engines like Google have a secret procedure for ranking the results and these results look different on different computers and at different locations. Youth Information works transparent a we clearly mark our criteria for ranking and providing information. Youth Information Centers do also know about things and informations that are not online. A search engine can only deal with informations that can be found on the internet.

At Youth Information Centers quality of the information rules about quantity of information. Our work is based on the European Youth Information Charta and the Principles for Online Youth Information. We help young people to decide, what is the best option for them and how to decide between different options. A search engine can only provide lots of information, they can only calculate information - we can evaluate and qualify information.

Youth Information Centers guarantee the right of privacy of each person. Have you ever thought about what Google knows about you just of the keywords you searched for?

Based on these discussion we decided at wienXtra-jugendinfo to create three posters, which are distributed at public libraries, youth centers and at public walls - with these sujets we want to make a statement what Youth Information has more to offer than an search engine. We used three quotations for that purpose:

• "Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don´t know we want" by Eli Pariser (by the way, great book of Eli Pariser: "The filter bubble - what the internet is hiding from us")
• "Computers are needless, they can only give you answers" by Pablo Picasso
• "Sorry - there are no results for your search. Please try again with another keyword" by the famous Search Engine :-)

After these quotations we are saying: "We have more to offer! wienXtra-youth information center. Your infopoint in the city center."

I´ve uploaded the three sujets and set also a link to the article "Jugendinformation - deutlich mehr als Google & Co.", which is based on our discussions at wienXtra-jugendinfo and the Austrian Network of Youth Information Centers (unfortunately the article is only in german available at the moment, maybe Google can help you to translate it). ;-)