September 13, 2003 spout

Google is Scary Smart, or Just Scary…

Saturday, September 13, 2003

When I was a kid, the source of universal knowledge at home was the set of dusty encyclopedias that my Mom inherited from somewhere. Today, it’s the Internet, via Google. That in itself makes Google the fulfillment of most sci-fi novels’ description of the the-store-of-all-human knowledge (I wish the text of all books were up, but that’ll happen in time…).

Anyway, it didn’t hit me just how comprehensive Google was til I typed in “Joe Grammer” wife’ yesterday (I was calling and wanted to be prepared to address his very nice wife by name in case she answered the phone). In 0.39 seconds, Google gave 45 results, the 3rd of which contained Joe’s wife’s name! It was Joe himself who’d mentioned his wife’s name in a mailing list post but still, that’s pretty damn scary…