Google Effect

A fairly recent development in cognitive biases is the Google effect. This is the tendency for people who are accustomed to accessing information online and in other memory storage devices to not bother memorizing, or rapidly forgetting, information than can be easily retrieved elsewhere.

This is also known colloquially as "digital amnesia."

This appears to be a side effect of people knowing that information is readily available or will be readily accessible in the future. Research on this topic is in its infancy but studies suggest that when participants are exposed to difficult questions they are primed to focus on computers and their access to information. When the participants believe that they will have future access to the information they have lower rates of recall of the information - but higher rates of recall for where to access the information.