Essay on Google, information, humans and computers.
Edit: in 2019 that blog post is long gone, but you can find it here thanks to the Wayback Machine.
How much ass does Google kick? All of it.
Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?
God, that sucked.
Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n – 1 out of n results.