Top > DaveNet archive > 2002 > The Mind of Google > The Mind of Google
| 1. | Open an outline window and enter the URL of a website that's the seed of my exploration. |
| 2. | Double-click. See the sites that are related to it. Pick one of its subs. Double-click. Invariably it loops back to the place I came from, but gives me nine other related sites. |
| 3. | It's a very simple way to crawl what I've come to think of as The Mind of Google. It's remarkably insightful for a piece of software. For example, I crawled my way to Dennis Ritchie's home page at Bell Labs. Ritchie is one of the inventors of the C programming language. Google relates his site to the sites of Bjarne Stroustrup, Don Knuth, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Steve Wozniak, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson. I'm not sure exactly what the common thread is, but they're all heroic developers who made significant contributions over many years to the technology and culture of computer programming. |
| 4. | I spent a couple of hours digging around. So many things to think about. So many puzzles. I came across the word telegraphy in dictionary.com as I was Google Outline Browsing, and found that many of the related pages were mine! Somehow it seems to have figured something out about me, or how I am perceived. It was at this point that I started to feel like I was interacting with something with a mind. Of course Google doesn't have one, but it does a fantastic job of tapping into our collective minds. In a sense Google is a global intellect, and I'm happy to report that the world has a good mind. Very interesting stuff. |
| 5. | Where the HTML interface for Google is a quick in-and-out, this is the contemplative side of Google, previously invisible, there was no user interface for it. |
| 6. | I announced this new way of browsing Google on Scripting News, and within a day, three other developers had similar browsers in HTML, and of course others are welcome to do it in an outliner, which is where the interface works best, imho. |
| 7. | Dave Winer |
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