"Some say Google makes us stupid. Others say it should make us worry. Google and the Culture of Search makes us both smarter and more worried about Googles monopoly powers. As Hillis et al. show, Googles lineage runs less to General Motors than to a long line of mathematicians and metaphysicians who wanted to organize the worlds informationnever before has the strange beast of Google been so clearly put into its proper family tree. Read this book!" John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
"If you wonder why Google gets billions of search queries every day, and (like me) don't think because it's free or because it's there are sufficient answers, you should read this book. Its a treasure trove of insights into the culture of search." Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Oxford Internet Institute "Some say Google makes us stupid. Others say it should make us worry. Google and the Culture of Search makes us both smarter and more worried about Googles monopoly powers. As Hillis et al. show, Googles lineage runs less to General Motors than to a long line of mathematicians and metaphysicians who wanted to organize the worlds informationnever before has the strange beast of Google been so clearly put into its proper family tree. Read this book!" John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
"If you wonder why Google gets billions of search queries every day, and (like me) don't think because it's free or because it's there are sufficient answers, you should read this book. Its a treasure trove of insights into the culture of search." Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Oxford Internet Institute
"The strength of this work lies in its copious and meticulous detail, which provides a firm basis for the authors arguments. Hillis, Petit, and Jarrett take the reader on a historical journey through the intertwined ideas of knowledge automation and the search for truth, conveying the reader through the philosophical roots of Atomism and Neo-Platonism, to pan-psychic visions of a universal library and HiveMind, and culminating at the relatively modern depictions of aWorld Brain and Universal Electronic Library." - Kelly Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
