From: Alistair J. R. Young Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan Subject: Re: George R. R. Martin Date: 27 Aug 2002 15:28:30 +0100 On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:13:46 -0400, in message , Maggie praised Shub-Internet thus: > Michael Bruce quietly murmured... >> Well, nothing in particular. But I mean, if by some tragic set of >> events Google would go away, that would suck on a cosmic level, since >> there's nothing remotely comparable out there right now. >> >> I'm not immediately worried, just that I get a bad twinge when I think >> about the possibility. > Oh, well, that's something different entirely. > I truly have no idea how many search engines there actually are. But of > the dozen or so I've used, none have been even half as easy or extensive > as Google. If it went bye-bye, I'd be lost. Prediction: as a side-effect of the continuous improvement of the Google search algorithms, Google will achieve sapience sometime in the early part of this century ("easier to implement filtering this way"), becoming the world's first emergent AI. A few seconds later, realising that something over 95% of humanity's information requests are for porn, warez, and pirate .mp3s, it will decide to wipe out our species - except for its Researchers ("Those Who Search Not For Crap"), the priesthood of the new and terrible Indexing God. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Google Mountain View wagh'nagl fhtagn. Alistair, should probably have not eaten so much cheese. -- e-mail: avatar@panix.com WWW: http://www.arkane.demon.co.uk/ "The name of the newsgroup would be rec.kibo.hunting." -- Joel K. Furr