[ponow]

There are "personal values" and there is "exchange value". The latter shows up in GDP. Isn't the problem with search also similar to education? Its effect is indirect on the both the consumer of education and within that consumer's society: when education is "useful", it enables all kinds of increased trade, not necessarily in education proper.

To do a proper experiment, I suppose we'd need to compare otherwise identical individuals with differing education. Similarly, we could compare people whose only significant difference is the amount of search using Google, and assess their effects on GDP. Daunting to carry out these experiments, but possible in principle, no?

[CydeWeys]

I'm old enough to have programmed a couple decades ago when you mostly had to rely on experimentation and manuals to figure things out. The experience today is much more streamlined. What might have taken me an entire afternoon to figure out in olden times can now take a single minute Google search. My productivity is substantially better now with the likes of Google, Stack Overflow, and all the other similar resources.