Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?

An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"

Comments

George Dyson

[QuantumG]

Yes.. it *is* that George Dyson.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/george_dyson.html

Freeman Dyson's son. Both the TED talks he's given are awesome.

Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness

[rts008]

Turn in your geek card!
It was Trinity that downloaded the program to fly the helicopter, not Neo.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

http://givemebackmygoogle.com/

Re:Assuming that Google could reach consciousness

[Dr. Manhattan]

Actually, the "template-based addressing" in the story really can have some profound effects. (My own explanation of how Tierra works here.) Google becoming intelligent probably isn't one of them, but some systems are a lot more 'evolvable' than others.

There is a good technical reason why this is done

[bigHairyDog]

Google is obsessive about reducing HTML size for fast delivery, and that explains two of your observations.

The JS obfuscation is code reduction - all the variable names are replaced with a single letter and the white space stripped in all of google's JS code to reduce the script length (though no doubt they like the fact that this makes reverse engineering hard too.)

Adding the events after the page loads means you can loop over the array of links returned by document.getElementsByTagName("A"), instead of adding the handler as text to every link.