The Google Project

• A list can be something between the formlessness of stream of conciousness, and mathematics and computer science.
• It all started when I realized that Los Angeles FreeNet for various bureaucratic reasons no longer gained any benefit from it's users having LAFN as their start page. An e-mail and the response confirmed this so the quest was on to create my own start or "portal" page.
• One of the things I wanted on this start page was to have the links go as directly to the functionality of the linked pages as possible.
• I mentioned this to L. while at one of San Fernando Valley LUG's meetings, in conjunction with a stab at it on Google. He pointed me to http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html|Scroogle_Scraper. At first I had this confused with some direct hack on Google's home search page.
• This list of thoughts got under steam the next day while showering and continued through a walk to the L.A. county library.
• I started digging around for all the Google search hacks.
• Did a bit of web surfing on the subject.
• Located my copy of the O'Reilly "Google Hacks" book.
• Then it occured to me, is there a Google Search man page?
• I stumbled onto the Google help page,
• But using one of the tips, 'man google' did not turn up a properly formated, real man page.
• Getting back to the start page project, one of the goals was to group some links into functional groups like E-mail, Twitter, Web 1.0, Web 2.0 etc.
• And where did Google belong on here, Web 1.0 or 2.0?
• And with a brief glimpse, a nanosecond flash of vision from the Stapledonian perpective, I realized that Google was in fact the first Web 2.0 application. With the power of superior indexing and search algorithms, they had effectivly shanghied preceeding Internet activity into providing the user supplied content for The Google Project, previously known as the World Wide Web.
• (with their search results, the mother of all mashups.)
• ...Or maybe it was Linux, that pulled ahead of BSD in mindshare by opening up to user supplied content.
• Or maybe Richard Stallman and the FSF?
• Besides, Google doesn't seem to have a charismatic leader like Linus, RMS or Jimmy Whales.
• Do they need one?