A is for Amazon.com
B is for Best Buy
C is for craigslist
D is for Dictionary.com
E is for eBay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google
H is for Hotmail
I is for Internal Revenue Service
J is for JetBlue
K is for Kohl’s Department Stores
L is for Lowe’s Home Improvement
M is for MapQuest
N is for Netflix
O is for Orbitz Travel
P is for Pandora Radio
Q is for Famous Quotes at BrainyQuote
R is for Redbox
S is for Southwest Airlines
T is for Target.com
U is for USPS - The United States Postal Service (U.S. Postal Service)
V is for Verizon Wireless
W is for Will Smith
X is for Xbox 360
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zillow
…
Instant
At my work in a fairly large private media business all of the people who work in the same position as I do use Google.com at an extremely high frequency. We use the website to check the spelling of proper nouns, usually places, companies or people’s names (politicians, business spokespeople, police officers, criminals, victims of crime and their family members and legal representatives, experts, social researchers or celebrities). Due to the expectation we complete our tasks in a very short and prescribed time frame we are each of us constantly clattering away at Google.com, making literally many hundreds of searches in a working day.
Some months ago, I noticed a discreet link to Google Instant had appeared just below the Google search box, inviting me to a slightly different version of the search engine. Some time after that, I noticed that on the browser on my work computer Google.com would now automatically load Google Instant, but offer, by way of a discreet link just below the search box, the opportunity to “Turn off Google Instant.” Now, when I load Google.com it is also Google Instant—they are now one and the same—and there is no longer any link to turn off the ‘instant’ aspect.
Insistent
Meanwhile, the computers at my work are all relatively quite old and slow, and the technological requirements of the Google Chrome browser means it often wildly outpaces the computers’ capabilities. The frenetic zeal of Google Instant, sweeping the entire Internet in an instant, will frequently leave my computer, which has dust and old crumbs caked in the crevices of its keyboard, wheezing and exhausted. On these occasions I may be typing out my proper noun, but only two or three letters will make it through to Google’s search box before the computer freezes, and yet Google Instant will industriously return a result anyway: Werribee’s ‘Wer’ becomes ‘Werner Herzog’; Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Lay’s ‘Dep’ becomes ‘Major depression’; Victoria Police’s ‘Vic’ becomes ‘Victoria’s Secret’; etc.
Name book
On Google, I’ve seen there have emerged very clear celebrity monopolies on given names. Type in any given name into Google Instant, and pages and pages of results will be returned for just one celebrity: after an instant, ‘kylie’ returns pop singer Kylie Minogue, ‘rebecca’ returns pop singer Rebecca Black, ‘chris’ returns pop singer Chris Brown, my own name, ‘will,’ returns movie star Will Smith.
gay
Lastly, when searching Google for the names of certain male public figures, like some lower-profile sports stars, news readers, and both lesser- and well-known entertainers, the second or third search suggestion alongside their full name is very, very often ‘gay’: ‘sam gilbert gay’; ‘joe o’brien abc gay’; ‘george clooney gay’; ‘vin diesel is he gay’; etc, indicating speculation about the possible homosexuality of male public figures is a significant preoccupation of people using Google.com.
…
Methodology
The above list was composed by typing just the single letter into the Google Instant search engine, and then waiting an instant for the top result. To conduct the search, I signed out of my Gmail account (I use Gmail), cleared my browser of all that I could see could be cleared (‘history,’ ‘cache’), and went to Google.com, instead of Google.com.au (reasoning universality, though finding America). I believe Google’s results reflect the popularity of searches made, and so these results reflect the popular enquiries of the world (America), but of course they also shape them.
Data
Of the 26 listings above, 15 (ABEJKLMNOPRSTVX) are all explicitly commercial enterprises, selling goods or services as their primary focus. Of these, six (ABEKLT) offer what I’ll call ‘conventional retail,’ selling a broad range of general household goods, like clothes and electrical appliances. While the remaining nine offer more specialised services, including four entertainment companies (NPRX), three travel companies (JOS), one maps company (M) and one Internet and telecommunications company (V).
Eight of the remaining 11 (CDFGHQYZ) are also profitable commercial enterprises, largely making their money, I think, through advertising revenue. Of the remaining three, two are government services (IU), and and there is only one individual out of the 26 (W), though it could be argued Will Smith is also a profitable commercial enterprise.
Of the 26, I’d put 11 in a category of ‘Internet-specific,’ i.e. organisations that did not pre-date, and came about in response to the Internet, and which depend on the Internet for their existence: ACEFGHNOPYZ. Of these, I believe seven could be considered Internet ‘pioneers’ (ACEFGHY), of which four (CFGH) could be considered administrative services, two (AE) facilitators of commerce and one (Y) an entertainment medium (though F, and to a lesser extent G and H, could certainly also make the claim to entertainment, or at least pass-time). Two of the four non-pioneer Internet-specific services (NP) would also be classed as entertainment, and the other two (OZ) as industry-specific administrative services.
Eleven (BIJKLRSTUV) either clearly pre-date the Internet, or theoretically do not depend intrinsically upon/are not based exclusively on the Internet for their existence (JR), or profit very particularly from the Internet, and use its technologies, but pre-date it in earlier forms (VM). A category for these could be called IRL (In Real Life).
The remaining four are a little less certain. One is a computer game medium (X) which can be seen to exist separate from the Internet as experienced in a web browser, but is obviously a heavily digitally-grounded pursuit. One is a movie star (W). And two (DQ) are the only two generic terms, describing language-based reference tools, which have, nonetheless, under Google Instant, also become commercialised, presumably trade-marked, presumably highly profitable businesses.
In a name
Of the websites’s names, 13 are neologisms: CEFHJMNORVXYZ, of which eight (CEFHJMRY) are basic portmanteau or compound words whose implied meanings are immediately apprehensible, and the remaining five (NOVXZ) consist of made-up or intentionally misspelt words, which are usually nonetheless reasonably transparent portmanteau words, for example: ‘Zillow,’ the real estate data company’s own website explains, is a portmanteau of “zillions of data points for homes accessible to everyone,” and ‘pillow’ since a home “is where you lay your head to rest at night.”
Of those names that are not neologisms, three (KLW) are family names, either the surnames of company founders (KL), or the full name of the only individual on the list, Will Smith. The two US Government services are bureaucratic titles more commonly known by their acronyms (IU). Five (BDQST) are simple, non-proper nouns, used to short, sharp effect as brand names (BT), or adhering to the prior, literal meaning (DQ, and there is something literal about S). The remaining three (AGP) are re- or misappropriated terms, from the world of science (G), the natural world (A), or mythology (P, and possibly A).
Google/googol
The brand name of Google is actually an alteration of the word googol, which describes the very large number of a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name googol was apparently coined in 1938 by a 9-year-old named Milton Sirotta who was the nephew of an American mathematician named Edward Kasner.
On Wikipedia (which it seems is less popular as a stand alone search term on Google than Will Smith), a googol is described as having “no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetically possible chess moves.” Kasner, Wikipedia says, used googol “to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity….”
A googolplex is an even more preposterously large number, and on its Wikipedia page there is a number of amusing demonstrations of just how large it is. Apparently the same 9-year-old nephew came up with the term googolplex to describe a number that was a “one followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” Popular astronomer Carl Sagan is said to have estimated that writing a googolplex (which is formally 10 to the power of googol) in numerals would be physically impossible, “since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.” Another example explains that the time it would take a human to write out a googolplex by hand would be many, many times the age of universe.
Google, Inc. have named their corporate headquarters Googleplex. (It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, United States, near San Jose.)
The difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity
Though Google will never know me completely, it does know an awful lot about my search habits, which would indicate to some extent my interests, the nature of my day job, the gaps and uncertainties in my knowledge, my passing health concerns, and also some of my insecurities, fixations, longings and desires. Like a ‘pinpression’ board, or a well-worn pair of shoes, or my bedroom when I am not in it, somewhere within the immensity of Google is a very detailed outline of me, but I realise the same also has to be true for millions and possibly billions of other people.
