The Search by John Battelle
(Nicholas Brealey, £25)
If Google were to disappear tomorrow, how much difference would it make to the world? Google does things that are indispensable to anyone using a computer in the modern world. Until you sit down and enumerate them, it isn’t obvious just how vast the company’s reach could be.
Here is my own shortlist: as well as the obvious internet searching, which I do maybe 30 or 40 times a day, Google supplies the maps and directions when I want to take a journey; it organises the pictures on my hard disk and does most of the editing they will ever get. The Google Talk program lets me talk—literally—to my sister, and to chat onscreen with my children, even when one of them is in the same house. There are some Google services I don’t use much: Gmail, which would keep all my email online, permanently searchable, and available from any computer on the net; Google News, which keeps an eye on the papers for me; and Google Reader, which could watch all the blogs and many of the websites I read in the same way. Blogger, which Google owns, could publish my blog; and coming off the net altogether, I could use the Google desktop search to rummage through everything on my hard disk and to keep all my files and emails indexed and searchable.
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