Collective intelligence has been following the cultural development of humanity since its first demonstrations in tribal societies, in context of collective coordination in hunting situations, to the contemporary complex societies, in the creation of knowledge and access a new frontier – the cyberspace. To access the vast library stored in the servers’ global network, search engines have emerged. The artificial intelligence of these tools was tested according to the obtained answers by surfers on the relevance and personalization. By far, Google stands out among the competition. Its secret, is quite simple: collective intelligence. In this exploratory study we identify the processes of collective cooperation that are used in problems resolution, by teens, with Google’ s search engine as the tool to access the information. The results point to a very basic pattern of use of the engine and a need for teaching and learning research techniques and information management.

In the paper we justify the study, present the detailed methodology and discuss the results.

Collective intelligence or (Surowiecki, 2005, p. 19), "wisdom of crowds", is a "distributed intelligence that is all around, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, resulting in an effective mobilization of skills" (Levy, 1994, p. 28), being "the basis and purpose of the collective intelligence ... the recognition and enrichment of people". However, Carr (2007) argues that the production with peers is seen more as a means of improving something old, already invented, it is more an optimization model than an invention model. He concludes that only a relatively small group formally organized of gifted professionals might produce breakthroughs.

Google is the undisputed leader in search engines because he knows the collective considerations of the people surfing the Net. PageRank technology enables finding relevant information by giving priority to the search results not by the characteristics of a document, but by the number of websites that are connected to it. A kind of “voting system” in which the final word always remains of the crowd. Every day millions of people pore over the screens of their computers and release their desires, fears and intentions on the simple colors in the bright white background of Google. What are we creating, from simple intention to intention, telling the world what we want?

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