Kashyyyk? I would be pretty impressed (concerned?) if just a random person knew the minutiae of Star Wars or whatever without access to the internet. Sports trivia is still alive and well even though there are thousands of reference books and online encyclopedias, and I suspect that Google isn't going to end non-sports trivia either.

This is absurd. Who plays trivial pursuit and allows a PC to be used? Now if you wanted to make the more general argument that individuals gifted with good recall of diverse facts are less useful to society, thats a good point. If I, for some reason, am desperate to know the name of Robert E Lee's horse, i dont need to call my civil war buff buddy, I can find out for myself in less than a minute. But trivial pursuit? Isnt that like saying the automobile ruined the game of hide and seek?

I agree. I think Curtis's comments about google and trivia are insipid. If anything, google has multiplied the pleasure of trivia, it's aggregation into tiny bits of information cast about the internet. Curtis is correct about the decreasing "generalness" of trivia knowledge, but that's because of a different emphasis on the kind of knowledge that is prized. The Genus edition of TP had tons of questions about History and Art (and even Sports) that are simply not the focus of what is considered "trivia" now, which focuses on how many films starring Bill Pullman you can name or how many people dated Lindsey Lohan in the last 3 years. Pop Culture has in many ways supplanted this kind of generalist trivia knowledge, trivia itself has become trivialized.

I can tell you that at least one top US college, there are $1-card head-to-head games of Trivial Pursuit being played. Throw a little gambling in, and every game has new life.

Jeopardy still seems to be doing quite well, and Ken Jennings still seems to be in demand.

Appropo of nothing really, "Trivial Pursuit", if it indeed is an American "institution" was ironically invented by two Canadians (see:)

Oh, and there are many other similar examples (John Naismith, inventor of basketball is one of my favorites: "you mean he's not American?").

Love to shock Americans. MM

The other factor that isn't really addressed in the article is that trivia designers adapt. They can write trivia that Google isn't very good at researching, trivia that will require something a little more specific than Google, or trivia that doesn't give you anything to type into Google. They can create trivia where Google's answer isn't the whole answer, trivia that doesn't ask a question, and trivia that expects you to use Google and will still be difficult. They can just ask you to play by the rules and punish as they see those rules broken.

Not all of these approaches explicitly require generalist knowledge, but when you don't know exactly what specialist knowledge will be required, generalist knowledge is invariably helpful in finding a path to the answer. And with the increasing number of possible specializations, a generalist with a weak specialization provides a team with better odds than several strong specialists. What the Internet has increased the value of is specialist knowledge of how to use (and when necessary, transcend) Google.

Finally, trivia writers can not worry about Google and figure you'll enjoy it anyway. (These last two are less to make my point (the second barely qualifies as trivia) and more for Drezner ;))