34 SEARCH HISTORY |^ RACHEL WILKINSON
- Why do people kill themselves?
- How large is the blast radius of a
nuclear bomb? - Does anyone’s family ever change?
- What is the difference between guilt
and shame? - Why did Elvis meet Nixon?
- How do I let go of anger?
- What if I hate my job?
- Why are avocados so weird?
- Am I having a quarter-life crisis?
- How deep is the deepest part of
the ocean? - Why can’t I want what I’m supposed
to want? - How many times does a blue whale’s
heart beat per hour? - Why?
This searching is the only prayerful thing I do,
though I admit that as a form of prayer, Google
search is problematic. Christianity emphasizes that
the purpose of prayer is not to find answers, assuage
existential anxiety, or to get things for ourselves.
Instead, it’s a means of knowing God, something
closer to surrender. Through knowing and accepting
God, we can begin to know and be at peace ourselves.
But maybe Google isn’t Christian; maybe it’s
Buddhist. Everyone in the internet-connected
world is familiar with Google’s uncluttered homep-
age: a single, rectangular search field with two
buttons underneath, fixed in the middle of a white
screen. Google’s colorful logo—originally designed
to evoke toy building blocks—appears above the
bar. The word “search” appears only once on the
page, in the left button below the search field,
though you can find it again by clicking on the
square “app grid” button at top right, a feature
added in 2013. Google has been praised for the
minimalism of its homepage since its inception.
The Google homepage has been called “Zen-
like” more times than are worth counting, though
the last time I entered the Google search query
“google zen-like homepage” it returned 13.4
million results. When I Googled “what is Zen,” I
got this list in my third result:- Zen is nothing and yet everything.
- Zen is both empty and full.
- Zen encompasses all and is encompassed
by all. - Zen is the beginning and the end.
- Zen encompasses all and is encompassed
Bodhidharma, a fifth-century Buddhist monk,
described Zen as a “direct pointing” to the mind
and heart. He said it’s a practice of studying
the mind and seeing into one’s nature. You sit,
not expecting enlightenment to strike, but in
concentration, waiting for things to be revealed to
you over time.this is how google works: instead of
giving you search results based on how many
times your search query appears on a given
website, it crawls the internet to determine how
many times sites relevant to your search query
are linked to other relevant sites. Then it ranks
the sites and lays them out in order. This algo-
rithmic ranking and delivery of the most relevant
results is called “search quality.” Udi Manber, a
former vice president of engineering at Google,
described the still-highly-guarded specifics of
the algorithm as the company’s “crown jewels.”
Indeed, one of the most famous parts of Google’s
ranking algorithm is PageRank, the rating
system developed by Google cofounders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford
PhD students.
I didn’t know any of this, despite having used
Google since the company’s incorporation in- I was 11 years old then. I can’t remember a
time when searching for “university” on an early
search engine such as AltaVista delivered the
Oregon Center for Optics homepage as the first
result, though apparently that’s what happened
in the mid-90s. And although the summer
Olympics were held that year, searching for
“Olympics” on AltaVista returned mostly spam.
Larry Page once described the perfect search
engine as something that “understands exactly
what you mean and gives you back exactly what
you want.” His description sounds kind of
touchy-feely—like the friend or partner who
intuitively knows what to say to you when you’re
upset. But in fact, what makes Google feel this
way is two highly technical components.
The first is Google’s reliance on natural language,
the term of art for searching based on human