Google’s search service used to feel like a portal to every bit of important information. Dimly remembered news stories from years earlier were instantly recalled in its search results if you could remember a single unique word or quotation. You could regularly find what you were looking for even if your search terms were roughly synonymous with the content you sought out. It felt like a genuinely enabling appendage to the human brain.
That was a long time ago, though. Then Google started messing with it. My ability to find what I want quickly atrophied as Google “improved” the algorithm for its ad business and then made “recency” an important component of every search, under the assumption that you couldn’t possibly be searching for old information. It added auto-complete so that you were more likely to search what other people had searched before you. But it started to become obvious that Google’s coders were hand-coding in exceptions and even inserting their biases. My friend noticed that you couldn’t get auto-complete to finish Pat Buchanan’s name; as you typed it out, it would suggest that you search for the far more obscure character actor Pat Buttram.
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