Een sprookje. Over wat Google werkelijk is:
by Kathy Kachelries
After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke Id already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.
Let me ask you something, the man said. I didnt argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think youre interested.
Have you ever created a web site?
I shook my head.
Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?
Nope.
What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didnt even have an AOL site or something?
Do I look like an AOL user to you? For the record, I dont think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. Im sure I have something, somewhere, I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.
You know what Google is?
Yes, I said. I was running low on patience.
No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?
Reluctantly, I shook my head.
You ever meet anyone who worked for them?
Dont think so.
You havent. Nobody works for them anymore.
I shrugged, and took the mans empty pint. I didnt offer to refill it.
Theyre self-contained. Its all automated, in there. Its underground.
I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. Why dont you eat something? I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.
Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works, he said, but didnt want for a response. They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when youre searching, youre not even searching the internet.
Ive heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. Same thing, though, I said.
You ever wonder why Google doesnt cache its own searches?
They program around it.
No. Thats what you think. Thats what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyones got one of those, right? But Google doesnt forget. Googles studied that thing so many times that its studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that its bigger than the internet?
Its still a part of the internet, though.
No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.
The man had a point. I nodded.
Heres the thing. Google has memorized who you are. Its memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And whats more important, its memorized its own idea of you. Google is omniscient. Its omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, thats when Google realized what it was.
Gradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. You think its sentient.
I know its sentient.
How?
He smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. Me and Google go way back. But what Im saying is, he continued, It knows us. All of us. It is us.
For the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.
Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. Its one of the nine billion names of God.
