I Can't Believe It's Not Blogging

The Message is Medium Rare

Google My Brain

Mar 10 2002

As I was hiking in Arches National Park last weekend, I was thinking Paul Ford's hilarious Google piece, and suddenly realized that this was how the producers of the Harry Potter film managed to precisely replicate -- to an eerie degree -- nearly everyone's visual imagination of the books. The explanation is indeed eerie: the GoogleBot can search inside the human head.

While somewhat alarming at first, this becomes much less so when one realizes the potential conveniences. I no longer have to remember my second birthday (or the memories I think I have of it), or the first time I hiked in a cold pre-dawn to a warm spring sunrise at a Uintah lake, or being picked on by my Boy Scout troop, or where I put my keys. I am no longer dependent upon my own mental "grep -ni 'keys' *" routines (or worse, "find /mnt/LastWeek/ -exec grep -ni 'keys' {} \;"). I can rely on Google to properly index these things, provide a clean search interface, and present a series of relevant results as first possibilities.

And for the things I am ashamed of, that I would just assume God, Google, and world forget (but perhaps I will remember, until my pattern of living has changed enough I no longer need guilt, shame, or pain to keep me away from reliving them), there is always robots.txt.

And should Google fail to respect that, .htaccess.

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