Infomation Idol

Many technologies change our lives; only very few infiltrate and colonise our language. Google is the name Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave to their upstart start-up eight years ago, which they charged with an immodest mission to ‘organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. To ‘google’ is now to rove the vast, virtual expanses of the World Wide Web; Germans ‘googelte’, Japanese ‘guguru’, Finns ‘googlata’. The word ‘search’ once evoked journeys to distant places and into darkest interiors; ‘search’ is now something we do from our computers, with Google and ‘search engines’ like it as our emissaries.