No Surprise - US Supreme Court Relies on Google
A law professor concluded that Justices on the Supreme Court regularly use Google since apparently Opinions issued by the Supreme Court cite facts never offered by the lawyers’ briefs. Professor Allison Orr Larsen (William & Mary Law School) studied 15 years of Supreme Court decisions and concluded that the Justices simply rely on Google.
Professor’s Larson’s conclusions are hardly a surprise given two Pew Research reports with these statistics:
92% of adults use search engines every day
86% of search engine users lean something new and important
What makes the Supreme Court Justices' reliance on Google more interesting is the prospect that search results are manipulated to generate more money for the search engines as alleged by the Texas Attorney General.
A former SCOTUS law clerk told me that Justice Souter was in awe of their ability to get him facts and information so unbelievably fast, just by visiting Google. (Souter was a technophobe, and never used a computer.) He called them "superclerks."