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.

Google is synonymous, too, with speed and simplicity. But nothing about it has been speedier or simpler than its rise. It is not a decade since it was first launched on the website of the inventors’ Stanford alma mater, not seven years since they first attracted backing from venture capitalists, and a mere 17 months since the company raised $US2 billion by going public, a process which has since inflated its market value to $US120 billion. Most technologies penetrate either public or private sphere. Google, with its disarming ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy, has come to pervade both, as the preferred means for about half the six hundred million searches initiated every day, whether by students seeking sources, employers verifying résumés, professionals trawling journals, shoppers chasing bargains or even lovers checking partners – it is now two years since Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw googled her paramour Aleksandr Petrovsky.

Nor is there sign of Google’s progress slowing. Google’s revenues mushroomed 96% last year; its ambitions exceed quantification. It has challenged eBay, Craigslist and other classified advertising formats with Google Base; it wants to wrest the video download market from iTunes with Google Video Store; it aspires to computerise the culture itself with the Google Print for Libraries project, comprising fifteen million digitised searchable books. Brin and Page tackle business with such evangelical fervour that one industry observer recently called Google “a religion posing as a company”.

The speed with which Google has attained ubiquity, however, is as problematic as it is intoxicating. Perhaps no innovation has been assimilated so wholly, and with so little reflection on how it may change us – as, inevitably, it will. For technological change, the sociologist Neil Postman remarked, is neither additive nor subtractive, but ecological: “One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given environment, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival.” Google’s impact on the biodiversity of the information ecosystem is not something we will ‘find on Google’, but it needs consideration – fast.

Type ‘Martin Luther King’ into Google and you will find as the third link, where it has been for at least five years, the site martinlutherking.org, purporting to be “a valuable resource for teachers and students alike”. If you start tapping the links, it emerges that this is far from “A True Examination of Martin Luther King”, but a white supremacist site promoting, among others, the works of the American fascist David Duke and the Stormfront nationalist movement. Yet there it remains, prominent in the ‘relevance ranking’ of Google’s legendary PageRank system, merely one of its famous eccentricities.

Google will find you any point of view on any subject, occasionally in close cohabitation: google ‘scientology’ and you are led first to the church’s official site, second to xenu.net, dedicated to attacking it. And often this is the outcome of calculated tendentiousness, intended to manipulate. Third on a Google search of ‘global warming’ is globalwarming.org, a site that only collates information disputing that world temperatures are rising; fourth is climatehotmap.org, a site only collating information that they are. And this can also get ugly: the fourth link in a search for Adolf Hitler is still the Hitler Historical Museum, the first crack in whose patina of historical respectability is a remark that negative views of Nazism are “standard, uninformative and clichéd”.