The Tower of Google
Once upon on a time, a time long, long, long ago, some men had a novel idea:They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." Genesis 11: 4
However, one thing lead to another and their plans ran a muck:
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. Genesis 11: 8-9
Once upon a time, but not too long ago, a few men had another novel idea:
"Myself and my partner, Larry Page, were just doing research in managing large amounts of information," says Brin. "That's called data mining, which means finding patterns in them. And eventually we turned to the World Wide Web, which is basically most of human knowledge, all together in kind of a very heterogeneous dispersed form."
Today, however, instead of running a muck these men have been fantastically successful:
In just a few years, the three guys in a garage grew into a company of 1,000 employees worldwide, taking in $1 billion a year. Today, Google is headquartered at a Silicon Valley campus called the GooglePlex.
The Tower of Babel, standing a high, reaching to the limits of the heavens, stood for an advancement of technology, of planning, and of man's ability to master self and nature. Its inhabitants reveled in their glory, free to carry on without hinderance of human tongue. Google, with its mass army of servers executing complex algorithms at unparalleled speeds, pulls data out of networks better then an Electrolux sucks dirt out of hard to reach corners. Enter into "GooglePlex" and we, like the inhabitants of Babel, are free to carry out quests for information without hindrance of human knowledge. No paging through books, cross-referencing of articles or possession of a library card required. Just a few key strokes and click. It's awesome, I love it, and admittedly, I am an addicted Googler. I only wonder, what ruin may someday befall us? And, more importantly - where can I get some help before it comes?
Note to readers: The Biblical references cited above, images, and original draft were all created by way of - can you guess? Google. Maybe it's to late.
Labels: Google
posted by John T. Byrne @ 10:18 PM
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