In the past five years or so since I was introduced to Google, I have come to appreciate and respect its systems that search for content based on your desired content search, and I have come to use their administrative services (often free) to great satisfaction.
But, I underestimated their programming abilities and was promptly made aware of the significance of their web crawlers when they found the secret web site we had been debugging for weeks and outed CadillacCicatrix.com publicly last week.
Basically, I had designed the website for the premier issue of the Cadillac Cicatrix and loaded onto a server behind the home page in order to make sure all the systems were in check and seamless before removing the curtain and announcing it.
Everything was a go, but for a few links here and there. But, I held back. Kind of like a father pretends to search for his keys (when they’re in his jacket pocket) in order to delay driving his child off to college.
We have been working on this first issue for the better part of a year: announcing our intention to create the magazine; initiating our first contest; judging the contest and awarding a winner; opening up the magazine to submissions, ads, comments.
Google saw through the curtain. Literally. And they peeked.
Unnerving in a way …
I am currently reading The Search, How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battle. It is a scary and enlightening book about the power of search mechanics in online systems such as Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.
In no short order, relatives and friends and researchers from the future will be able to look back on us all and review our culture by searching our searches, which (I don’t need to tell you) are a mirror of our intentions.
So, in fifty years, when my children have children (notice my intention here), they may be able to look back and see just what I was doing in my life by what I searched for on the Internet. They might see that I intended to release Cadillac Cicatrix on March 1, but was outed by Google’s efficient systems even before I intended to announce those intentions.
In the end, I’m not mad at Google. I’m not even a little upset. I simply feel like the dad whose keys are obviously hidden too closely to his intention to keep his child at home.
Whatever my intentions, whatever our cause … Cadillac Cicatrix is open for business.
