The alchemy of Google's motto lies in the vast possibilities offered to knowledge prospectors by the company's assorted search tools. Granted, Google tends to obscure valuable knowledge by the large influence of vox populi on it's PageRank algorithm, but such is the price of the tool, much like Harlequin books are the price of literature.
As it is the true power of the eponymous search tools are tapped by few. Ruben Puentedura made some excellent presentations using mashups of search data and visualization tools. Most users are content whatever pops up first as a search result on a given keyword, and with finding the occasional easter egg like Google maps reporting that there is no possible route from Iran to the United States (though there is one from Tokyo to New York involving a kayak).
There is a higher price to pay than having popular search results confused with best search results, however. Our surfing behavior is deftly stored, surveyed and mined by companies staking a claim on our hearts, minds and wallets in order to provide the billions it costs to build these tools. This of course is part of a larger trend of trading privacy for value, which is a business model shared by that other giant of the web, facebook. Dissecting this trend is outside the scope of this post but something I'd love to discuss in the future.
Google redeems itself by performing brilliant alchemy turning knowledge of the world's pedestrian surfing habits into peerless tools for intrepid explorers. The fuzzy sciences haven't had such a treasure trove of information on human behavior since we started writing about ourselves. Turning adsense into insight makes up for a lot.
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