There are those who google and there are those who annoy those who google. As a member of the former group, people who don’t reflexively look things up online have at best rendered me speechless and at worst left me fearing for the fate of humankind. I have, however, recently learned that those who turn to a search engine at the slightest mention of a forgotten factoid might not be all that better off.

Before discussing the latest research in this area, it’s worth travelling back to 2011 when some commentators contributed to the genre of “this new technology is definitely going to ruin us this time”. That year, Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University and colleagues published an article in Science entitled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”, triggering starting guns for the latest existential crisis about the web.

The researchers themselves had a positive take on their findings. Sure, the test subjects were bad at recalling memorable bits of trivia — such as an “ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — when they thought the data were being saved by a computer in front of them. And, yes, the subjects’ recall was better when they were told that the data wouldn’t be saved. But the interesting part was a separate experiment in which the trivia was saved in generically named folders such as “Facts”, “Data” and “Info”.