I made a mistake tonight. Chris was telling me about a new command-line bugzilla client called boog. I threw it into Google and by mistake, perhaps out of habit, wrote 'book' instead of 'boog.' And what came back was surprising.
Guess who owns the #1 Google result for 'book.' I asked some friends to guess and I heard things like Google Books and Amazon. No. This is the web. Think harder. Want to call a friend for help? You'd be getting closer if you did.
The number one result for 'book' on Google, as of this minute, is this:
Welcome to Facebook, indeed! Are you kidding me? Google, seriously, are you kidding me? Alright, I'll bite, let's click that link. The word 'book' never occurs. Not once. Obviously it does say 'Facebook' many times. But surely that's not what powers Google? Do I need to add the Society for the Preservation of the Book as a friend first?
What's going on here? Don't try telling me that there are millions of pages within Facebook that talk about books, and this is as close as one can get when not logged in. Maybe a first iteration of Google would have fallen for this, but not now. I love Google, don't get me wrong. It's so good I can basically replace any number of ways of storing, sorting, and remembering information with their search. Except I clearly can't leave the work of remembering what a book is to Google.
You always wonder where the edge of the web is, and what it looks like. This is it. Get out your digital camera.