July 26, 2005

The Power of Google

The other night I was chatting with my wife about things and I mentioned a TV show that I saw back in the 1980's about a home-brew nuclear device in which the bomb-squad person who cuts the cliché red or green wire makes the wrong choice.

So I went to Google to find the movie.  I had a hard time finding it.  (I eventually did - it was the 1983 show Special Bulletin.)  But along the way I more than once wondered whether my memory was playing games on me.

The meta-thought that came about was this:  There is all this noise about whether the internet should have one single domain name system (DNS) namespace (an argument more frequently cast, incorrectly, as whether the internet shall have one catholic DNS root.)  Yet, with the rise of a highly dominant search engine, Google, the policies and choices of Google have a much greater power to define what is, and what is not, on the internet than do any policies about the domain name system.

To an increasing degree, if it ain't in Google, it doesn't exist.  That's scary.

Posted by karl at July 26, 2005 8:10 AM