What’s the biggest influence on the way we think? (Googling it won’t help) | John Naughton
The dominant search engine of its time is a powerful tool - but now it is shaping us
This is a month of anniversaries, of which two in particular stand out. One is that it’s 10 years since the seismic shock of the banking crisis – one of the consequences of which is the ongoing unravelling of the (neo)liberal democracy so beloved of western ruling elites. The other is that it’s 20 years since Google arrived on the scene.
Future historians will see our era divided into two ages: BG and AG – before and after Google. For web users in the 1990s search engines were a, a search tool developed by the then significant Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which was the best thing available at the time.
