One in a hundred million

If you were to type the words downloading my brain into a search engine you might be offered, as I was with Google just now, one hundred and ten million results in 0.29 seconds.

Putting in the quotation marks to limit the search to exactly that phrase would reduce the number of results to a more manageable half million or so.

It makes me wish I had kept a record of the number of results I used to get when Googling my own blog was something I did most days. To the best of my recollection, when I started in late 2006 there was only one exact match other than this blog.

I would not claim any originality for the phrase, although I did not consciously copy it from anywhere. It is in fact a fairly obvious idea in this downloadable age – whether as metaphor or literal conceit – so it is not surprising that it should occur independently to so many.

In those long-ago days of 2006 it was quite easy to find quite commonly-used words as search terms which would produce no results at all. Google would be quite concerned & offer hints as to how you might change things in order to find something – anything.

No thank you, I meant precisely what I said, substitutes not accepted.

In reality the proliferation of downloaded brains must correlate highly with any other measure of the growth in the size of the web over the last five years. This phenomenal growth has the perverse effect of taking away some of the power or usefulness of search engines. No longer can you expect to find easily the most authoritative or original source; better, if you can, to go directly to the website of the originating organisation & hope that they have a user-friendly guide on their site.

Otherwise it teaches us the drawback of unlimited choice, & reminds us once again of the value of editors, indexers & those others who will be our guide as to what is worthwhile or at least meets our own peculiar* needs.

*In the sense of, as the OED explains, ‘Distinguished in nature, character, or attributes from others; unlike others, sui generis; special, remarkable; distinctive.’

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