Looks like we’re moving up in the (online) world, darling kittehs.  

Here’s what happened:  Your favorite old, muttery servant of the eyeball gods gets on his old, rattley computer this morning.  Just like every other morning.  Read endmyopia inbox e-mails, one finger peck answers on the 1980’s keyboard of his 1980’s IBM PC©.  

Mostly questions that a quick Google search can answer.  

Also real quick here before we go on.  Why, people, seriously?  Don’t they have the Google where you’re from?  Is it hard to type “endmyopia + whatever your keyword” in that search box?

Anywho.

Mutteringly typing ‘active focus’ into Google to teach yet another person how to use search, today had an interesting new result:

See it?

Yes, it’s a Google card.  Shows up at the top, before all the URL search results.  Pretty cool!

If you’re not familiar with Google cards then maybe this doesn’t elicit much excitement on your part.  But it’s kind of a big deal.

Google cards is basically what Google thinks is the answer to any given question asked of it.  A lot of search seems to be moving into the realm of voice and integration into other tools, and away from just showing you a giant list of links to Web pages.  Basically if you use Google Now voice search, or Siri or Amazon Echo to ask a question, you expect an actual answer spoken to you, rather than just a list of Websites.  And all the big players are pushing hard on this front.

From what I read this concerns a lot of content creators online, with these big search providers ‘plagiarizing’ answers, and also marginalizing Websites in general and especially anything that’s not #1.

Not something we’re much concerned about because endmyopia obviously = #1.

That’s Google cards.

But it’s not like Old Totterbox is much into all this search stuff.

All this basically just to say that the ongoing work we’re all contributing to the project continues bringing results.  Think of it this way:  If an annoyed optometrist hears ‘active focus’ from a “patient” and goes to ask Google, he’ll get an answer that says “active focus is a core principle of myopia rehab according to the endmyopia method”.

Kind of cool, yea?

And sure, the skeptic may say that there are probably all sorts of tinfoil conspiracies that get Google cards too.  It’s not gospel, Jake, a Google card.  Just another one of the endless ongoing machinations of search engine stuffs.

Who knows, really.  Maybe when they figure out the whole artificial intelligence thing, the first thing it’ll tell humanity about myopia will be … all the things it learned from endmyopia.org.  ;)

Cheers,

-Jake