Turns out Google is now 15 years old. Say what? Google told us it was true last week with their super fancy pinata game and the big number “15″ candle on the cake. We started talking on the phone after our 57th round in a row of playing that game and saying stuff like, “How can it have been around since 1998?” and “I know I didn’t use Google to search for stuff back then. I still carried a beeper for God’s sake.” We ended up talking about the old search engine Alta Vista, which we both remembered but our best memory was of this…

Ask Jeeves! Now those were the days!

Happy Birthday Google! Please don’t disappear on us like DogPile, HotBot or Lycos did!

You know the age old saying about a tree falling in the forest and no one being around to hear it?

I feel that way about Google.

I use it for everything. If I have a question, Google has the answer. In fact, most of the time Google is so helpful that it knows my question before I even finishing typing it. (Is my headache…trying to kill me…yes, Google, that is what I wanted to know, thank you).

Take today for example. My dad and I were having a discussion about presidential term limits. I told him I was so sure that people could only be President for a maximum of two terms over their lifetime, not just consecutive terms that I would be willing to bet all the money in my wallet on it. Which, given that I had a whole three dollars to bet should tell you that I was *pretty* confident in my knowledge.

But, just to be totally sure, before I parted with enough money to get three chances to win the Powerball lottery, I checked Google.

Sure enough, I was totally right, and my dad owes me $3. Pay up Dad, lottery tickets don’t buy themselves, you know.

I realized, though, after I hung up with him that I rely on Google the way my mother used to try to make me rely on our set of World Book Encyclopedias. If I had a question back in the day, she would totally tell me to “go look it up”.

Forget the fact that it might have been 1989 and our encyclopedias came out in 1984 [You were lucky! I grew up with the red, white, and blue 1976 Bicentennial edition! -Lisa], if I needed an answer to something that is where I would find it. Unless, of course, it was an event from 1986, then I was out of luck.

I honestly feel like Google has the answer for everything and if you can’t find the answer on Google, then the answer just doesn’t exist. So, thank you Google, you solve my problems, you make me richer, and I can even find out things that happened after 1984.