McCoy Tyner / Fly With the Wind (1976)

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“Search is the number-one thing people do on the Web today. Number two is e-mail. And the big complaint we get isn’t about speed – we’re the fastest there is. What people want is even more information, from sources that are not currently searched. Research reports, news files, historical archives, university projects – they’re out there, but not yet in publicly searchable sources. Getting that information indexed is a Herculean, but incredibly important job.” Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google, in American Spectator (August 2001).

“Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a given period, we can form a fairly accurate impression of the chief preoccupations of society at that time and the points at which the boundaries of human endeavor are being advanced.” John Ayto, Twentieth Century Words.ss

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In 2002, I was invited to the new Google facilities in Palo Alto by the VP of Publicity. His invitation was based on an my article Electric Symbols published in the peer-reviewed Internet online magazine First Monday. The article proposed a bold use for word search on the emerging Internet. An abstract of the article noted the famous Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis posited a linguistic determinism arguing language plays a central role in creation of a worldview. In the sense that language is a product of words, one can say that a culture’s worldview is affected and influenced by the words of its language. Words both create and communicate worldviews. The greatest potential in history for the observation and analysis of words exists on the Internet. Indeed, the Internet can be considered history’s greatest observatory and laboratory of words. At the time, the new Google was the greatest observatory of words on the Internet.

I had been reading First Monday for a few years while working on several other projects. One of these projects was writing book reviews for a growing publication called The Industry Standard. It started out to be a rather small part time project, but it got larger and larger as the books to review kept increasing as well as a ridiculous amount of money I was being paid for the 1,200-word reviews. The books reviewed were part of the magazine’s “Intellectual Capital” section. As many remember, the phrase “intellectual capital” was a common buzz word at the time meaning the value of all the knowledge, ideas, and people in an organization. With the growing new technology of the Internet, knowledge and ideas were being viewed as having a new type of value. My position as book reviewer was to extract the essence of new books on the Internet from leading technology gurus of the time.

The Industry Standard cover from 1999 / The height of its golden days

The book editor of The Industry Standard and I got along well. Both of us had lived and worked in Berkeley and had many similar interests. The magazine was the fastest growing new magazine for the Internet and advertising cash was flowing into it. There were large Friday parties on the roof of the magazine’s office building. I went to a few of them the summer I worked for the magazine. Expensive wine and elaborate food spreads were part of the events. The magazine was on a roll, and they knew it and there was cause for celebration. 

It was an era of invention and new things in the world, and it was good to be around people who were at the forefront of reporting and promoting this new perspective of things to the world. There was a huge number of books being published attempting to explain the new technology of the Internet and all publishers of these books wanted a review in The Industry Standard. I visited the book editor usually once a week to pick up the new books to review. There were piles of books surrounding his desk.  I usually left with four or five books to read and write reviews due in a few weeks.

* * *

As the months progressed, the flow of books to review began to taper off. In March of 2000, the books stopped coming altogether. It wasn’t surprising as the dot.com bubble burst happened on March 10, 2000. It was a devastating blow to many in the industry but luckily, I wasn’t in the industry as much as an observer of the industry through the book reviews. Besides, I was involved in other business ventures, so it was time to return to them. 

But through this period, I had an idea that related to a new company with the funny name of Google that had a way of searching for things on the Internet. The term google itself is a creative spelling of googol, a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially, an unfathomable number. Googol was coined in the 1930s and is attributed to the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. 

During my time of reviewing books for the Industry Standard, I used the Google search engine to find background information on the books I was reviewing. I came to see the potential for this new search engine as offering insight into rising trends and undercurrents of culture. For a number of years I had been reading, writing and publishing articles about symbols and symbolism. I wondered if words searched on the Internet might offer some insight into hidden symbols influencing the events of culture. In effect, I felt that words searched on Google represented types of “electric symbols.” 

* * *

It seemed to me one of the greatest things Google offered was the ability to translate the “text” of culture into images or symbols by analyzing the dynamics of rising and falling word searches on Google. Cultural text was no longer bring but digital. In effect, words were “electric symbols” in the digital era. 

The writing of the article came quickly as I had already written much of it in my mind. I speculated that Google could provide a method to look at symbols through the massive number of words searched. 

Like a lot of others at the time, I was hopefully naive about the Internet and not yet cynical about it. I had a belief it could do positive things for people and the world. This philosophy was in the atmosphere at the time with the ideas of Steve Jobs and his company Apple. 

I was surprised that the article was accepted almost immediately for publication by the prestigious First Monday, perhaps the leading Internet think journal. It ended up making quite a stir and I received a number of emails from various well-known authors and scholars. One of the people who contacted me was the VP of Publicity for Google. He told me he liked the article and invited me to visit Google and have lunch with him. 

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Google in 1999 / A few years before I visited them

Of course, I accepted. I called my good friend Bill who lived in Sebastopol to drive down to Google with me. I thought he would be interested in seeing Google as he was a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the entrepreneurial program and President of a company for inventors called America Invents. Bill had read my article and was interested in seeing Google. 

The VP met us in the lobby of Google that looked somewhat like the playroom of a daycare center. On a side of the lobby with some employees were engaged in a mean game of foosball and others sat on giant rubber balls looking at the screens of their laptop computers. 

The tour was very illuminating for Bill and me. The VP told us Google employs more people with a Masters or PhD degree than any other company in the world. There is a large room full of employees engaged closely with their computer screens and keyboards. But mixed with all of this are more play areas. Neither Bill nor I had ever seen a company that seemed to mix play and work so effortlessly. 

In one of the common areas, the VP showed us a large monitor of current leading words searched on Google. The monitor was constantly changing as new words rose to the top of words searched while other words declined. We lingered at the monitor for a few minutes. It was somewhat like watching a stock ticker tape. I was fascinated by the monitor as it offered an example of the ideas expressed in “Electric Symbols.”

* * *

After the tour, the three of us picked up lunch in the cafeteria and walked out to the courtyard of the company and sat down at a table. The VP told me a lot of people at the company found my article interesting with its suggestion of a new use for Google data. I told him I saw an opportunity to look at the world in new ways and gain new insights about it. 

 Sergey Brin and Larry Page in Google’s Early Days

The VP shook his head in agreement.

“Your article proposes an ambitious program,” he says. 

“Yes, but it also provides an outline for starting a program like this,” I respond. “The monitor you showed us is evidence you are already monitoring rising and falling words.”

The VP agrees the company can do this.

“Have you heard of our AdWords product?” the VP asks. “It enables businesses to buy ads related to search terms.”

Both of us had heard of it but knew little about it.

“Advertising is the future of Google,” the VP said. “But your idea is still interesting.”

In a moment he looks at his watch and gets up saying he has a meeting in a few minutes. 

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Half an hour later, Bill and I have are heading north up 101 for Sonoma County. 

“Google is not about to follow the suggestions in your article,” Bill says.

“No surprise to me,” I say. “didn’t expect them to. There’s no path to an income stream by analyzing the broad cultural trends of words.”

“Maybe someday someone will figure out a path to income,” Bill says.

“Maybe some day,” I agree. “But I’m not holding my breath.”

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