Are we Searching Google, or is Google Searching us?

Posted 29 Jul 2008 at 15:10 UTC by steve

The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else. Something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, "This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand." After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does, "Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?".

Slashdot, posted 30 Jul 2008 at 15:38 UTC by steve » (Master)

I noticed we made Slashdot again - sort of. They used our posting verbatim without giving us a link or a credit - again. This seems to be happening with increasing frequency. Oh well, ironically, Google searches all of us.

Slashdot, posted 30 Jul 2008 at 15:48 UTC by JamesBruton » (Master)

That's because Slashdot's content is user submitted, so the article could have been submitted by anyone. The moderator that posted it just didn't happen to read robots.net today, so they didn't know any different...