By way of explanation, I’m thinking a lot about search engines. I’ve been doing that for about a decade, but now it’s my job! I’ve also been rereading Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (more on this later), and he’s always great at gearing up to think really big about something. Which led to me recalling one or two pieces of science fiction written about search engines, so I tried to find them.
It turns out that queries like "search engine fiction" and "search engine stories" or even "fiction.about.search.engines" etc. are pretty useless. But with a little poking about I found the ones I’d been looking for:
- The original Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford
- How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web (More essay-like prognostication than fiction) also by Paul Ford
- Even more Paul Ford Google stories
- I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google by Bruce Sterling
That’s what I can find on the web. I know there’s a bunch of cool far-future search engine action in SF novels — I’m pretty sure there’s some interesting stuff in William Gibson, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow, Ken MacLeod .. anyone have any suggestions?