All the talk of Google being an operating system left me scratching my head for more than a year. I just didn’t get it until I read Steven Johnson’s “Tool for Thought” essay in this morning’s New York Times. Then the light went on and I remembered what I already knew (hell, what I’d written three books about fifteen years ago): associative search changes everything.
“These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for ‘dog’ and missing all the articles that have only ‘canine’ in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas”
Of course none of this is new. The idea originated with Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, was refined by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s, polished by Ted Nelson in the 1970s, romanticized by Apple in the 1980s, and finally partially executed by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1990s.
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