CREATIVE NONFICTION 35speech rather than computer commands. Squarely
in the realm of artificial intelligence, natural lan-
guage is why you can enter “hot dog” as a search
query and Google can understand that you mean
the open compound word and food item, rather
than a perspiring poodle. Google is revolutionary
in that its interpretive process is continually refined
through tracking its user queries, which provide an
enormous sample of how people speak naturally.
Google historian Steven Levy writes, “Google
came to see that instant feedback as the basis of
an artificial intelligence learning mechanism.” In
other words, the more we search, the more Google
learns to talk and think like us. It draws ever closer
to always knowing exactly what we mean and
what we’re looking for.
This progression was most visible with Google
Instant, the 2010 search enhancement that
predicted what your search query would be and
displayed search results as you typed. Clicking
“search” was made unnecessary. Google’s official
press release from that time explained that the
thinking behind Google Instant was that people
read faster than they type. Whole seconds were
saved by letting users scan instant search results
so they could refine their queries on the fly,
rather than having to retype them. But the actual
feeling of using Google Instant was that the search
engine was thinking faster than me; before I could
even fully think of how to ask my question, it
understood and was answering.
“There is a psychic element,” then-Google vice
president Marissa Mayer told a press conference,
“because we can predict what you are about to
search on in real time.” After seven years, Google
did away with Instant in July 2017, stating that
the feature is less fluid for mobile searchers. Still,
auto-complete results show up in a drop-down
menu below the search bar, drawing on decades
of logged language. Even without Instant, Google
still phrases my queries better than I could (and in
milliseconds). It’s me without the clumsiness of
my communication.
The second technical component is the way
Google returns search results with more informa-
tion (“gives you exactly what you want,” in Page’s
words). In earlier search engines, results were
returned based on how many times your query
appeared on a webpage. But the expansion of the
internet presented a problem: maintaining search
quality when analyzing millions of websites
becomes difficult with no way to determine
relevance. But since Google search exploits the
link structure of the internet, more websites
simply means improved search quality. New
websites supply more links, giving Google more
clues to determine a particular website’s relevance
to your search query.
And the more the web expands, the more com-
plex and dynamic the portrait of user behavior
becomes. Google finds failures in its ranking
algorithm and then works to correct them. The
more we search, the more Google can know about
us. Google is recursive, circular. Empty and full,
all-encompassing. Google was designed to be “the
ultimate learning machine.”
I submit that the internet is the greatest human
achievement—the integrated whole of human
knowledge. In the mere fact of its integration, it
is superhuman, beyond any one of us and inacces-
sible in its entirety. We need a medium to reach
across the digital ether and speak to it. This is
where Google comes in.
Like an oracle, Google can access and interpret
the world beyond, though it is still essentially of
this one. To me, the internet feels infinite, inscruta-
ble, but the experience of coming to Google is still
individual, intensely personal. Rather than being a
superhuman artificial intelligence, what if Google
is simply more human than all of us—imbued
with all our semantics and our behavior and our
private inquiries and our thoughts? It has learned
to know us exactly as we try to know ourselves.
Disembodied, it is the questioning impulse itself. I
love it and hate it for precisely this reason.the word SEARCH originated in the twelfth
century, from the French cerchier meaning “to
search.” It’s one of those words whose etymology
can be slightly frustrating, because its place in
language is apparently so singular and essential,
its history is just iterations of the word itself. But
search has its root in the Latin circare, to “go about,
wander, or traverse” and circus, ring or circle.
There is something recursive about it: to search,
one goes round and round.
Technically, I have search in my email. I have
search on my desktop. I have search in my pocket