[ed. I know, another article about search. I'm just beginning to get the implications of this technological battleground.]
Thinking about Google over the last week, I have fallen into the typically procrastinatory habit of every so often typing the words "what is" or "what" or "wha" into the Google search box at the top right of my computer screen. Those prompts are all the omnipotent engine needs to inform me of the current instant top 10 of the virtual world's most urgent desires. At the time of typing, this list reads, in descending order:
What is the fiscal cliff
What is my ip
What is obamacare
What is love
What is gluten
What is instagram
What does yolo mean
What is the illuminati
What is a good credit score
What is lupus
It is a list that indicates anxieties, not least the ways in which we are restlessly fixated with our money, our bodies and our technology – and paranoid and confused in just about equal measure. A Prince Charles-like desire for the definition of love, in my repetitive experience of the last few days, always seems to come in at No 4 on this list of priorities, though the preoccupations above it and below it tend to shift slightly with the news.
The list also supports another truism: that we – the billion components of the collective questioning mind – have got used to asking Google pretty much anything and expecting it to point us to some kind of satisfactory answer. It's long since become the place most of us go for knowledge, possibly even, desperately, for wisdom. And it is already almost inconceivable to imagine how we might have gone about finding the answer to some of these questions only 15 years ago without it – a visit to the library? To a doctor? To Citizens Advice? To a shrink?
That was the time, in the prehistory of about 1995, when our ideas of "search" still carried the sense of the word's Latin roots – a search was a kind of "arduous quest" that invariably involved "wandering" and "seeking" and "traversing". Not any longer. For those who are growing up to search in this millennium, it implies nothing more taxing than typing two words into a box – or, increasingly, mumbling them into a phone – and waiting less than an instant for a comprehensive answer, generally involving texts and images and films and books and maps. Search's sense of questing purpose has already gone the way of other pre-Google concepts, such as "getting lost".
That rate of change – of how we gather information, how we make connections and think – has been so rapid that it invites a further urgent Google question. Where will search go next? One answer to that question was provided by the billionaire double act of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google's founders, in 2004, when pressed about their vision of the future by the former Newsweek journalist Steven Levy.
"Search will be included in people's brains," said Page of their ambition. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information."
"That's true," Brin concurred. "Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now, you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into or you can have computers that pay attention to what's going on around them…"
Page, generally the wilder thinker, was adamant, though. "Eventually, you'll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer."
Nine years on, Brin's vision at least is already reality. In the past couple of years, a great advance in voice-recognition technology has allowed you to talk to search apps – notably on iPhone's Siri as well as Google's Jelly Bean – while Google Now, awarded 2012 innovation of the year, will tell you what you want to know – traffic conditions, your team's football scores, the weather – before you ask it, based on your location and search history. Page's brain implants remain some way further off, though both Google founders have lately been wearing "Google Glass" prototypes, headbands that project a permanent screen on the edge of your field of vision, with apps – cameras, search, whatever – answerable to voice-activated command. Searching is ever more intimately related to thinking.Outside Google HQ in Mountain View, California.
In this sense, the man who is, these days, in charge of the vast majority of the world's questing and wandering and seeking and traversing is called Amit Singhal. Aged 44, head of Google Search, he is a boyishly enthusiastic presence, who inhabits a much-mythologised office in Mountain View, California, somewhat in the way that the Wizard of Oz lived at one end of the Yellow Brick Road. Singhal is the man who pulls the levers that might just help you find a heart, or a brain, or the way back to Kansas. For a dozen years, he has taken over responsibility from Brin for writing and refining the closely guarded algorithm – more than 200 separate coded equations – that powers Google's endless trawl for answers through pretty much all of history's recorded knowledge. So far, he has never stopped finding ways to make it ever smarter and quicker.
by Tim Adams, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Google/Rex Features
