Have Search Engines and the Internet made us intellectually lazy?

When I was a child, my family was given a set of encyclopedias.

When we had a question that we didn't know the answer to, we'd look it up by letter going through the pages until we found the right entry and try to find the answer.

If the answer wasn't easily found, a trip to the library might actually be called for.

Researching a paper for school took hours of finding resources on the topic, taking notes on 3x5 cards and then rewording the parts that made up the meat of the paper and making sure to carefully note the exact quotes.

I have never written a paper for school using quotes and facts and information I have gotten off the Internet.

And I walked 7 miles, up hill both ways, just to get to school every day.

One of the main uses of the Internet (second only to porn) is to make a vast wealth of human knowledge available with a greater element of ease to anyone with an Internet connection than ever before in human history.

I can find the answer to just about any question I could have, legal, medical, historical, even a recipe in under 5 minutes.

And that search time is shortened with each relevant change to the information gathering technology that the Search Engines implement to bring us more relevant search result for the kind of searches we do.

I often find myself having conversations and asking questions or having people ask me questions and I either think or say "Good question. I'll look that up" meaning I'll fire up Google and check for the answer.

I probably only actually do that occasionally.

The actual "look it up" part.

I don't think of myself as intellectually lazy.
Maybe I am and am just in denial, but I don't think of myself in that way.

But there's something about knowing that I can look anything I want to up this easily that makes the need to actually look something up right then and there feel less pressing.

There's something about the idea that any piece of information I could want to access being this readily accessible that makes me overconfident perhaps.

I think I sometimes forget that just because the information is available, that if I don't make the very real effort to actually transfer that piece of information from a page of Search Engine results, it's not actually information that I have.

Not my own personal knowledge, just potential knowledge which doesn't do anything for me at all until I actually make the effort to make it knowledge I have.

And I've been wondering what this is like for the younger Internet generation.

Do they feel that a universe of knowledge is available to them so they don't have to bother transferring that information to their heads unless they're being graded on it?

And even when they're being graded on it, does information that is found with the input of a few key-strokes and a click and then that is copy-pasted into a word processing file that they can shuffle around with ease until it forms a semi-coherent paper actually stick in their minds the same way it does when it's searched for and found out of an entire book and then written down by hand and rewritten?

It's one of those things that makes me go "Hmmmmmmmmm..."