Google Search Quotes

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.

Cindy extended her hand. I got up, faced her, and shook her hand. A strong handshake. This was definitely a no-nonsense young woman. “I recognize you from your pictures, Mr. Ludefance.” “Pleasure to meet you, Cindy. And you can call me Jack. I’m afraid you have the advantage. You probably did a Google search on me and have all my background information?” She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” “I don’t.

My Google search history alone was probably enough to put me on a government watch list. I wrote suspense novels about murders like this. I’d searched every possible way to kill someone. With every conceivable kind of weapon.

When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being.

And there it was. Just like that I had my next case and my curiosity was piqued. Connecting to the ship’s Wi-Fi, I did a Google search of Judge Russell Hastings of Tallahassee, Florida. Wow. Wow. Wow. Perusing just a few of the hundreds of listings it became quickly apparent that the judge was both well-known and well-respected. The murder of a high-profile appellate judge in his own chambers was a mystery that had baffled the Tallahassee police for over a year. There were pictures of the judge and his family; including a beautiful wife and three grown daughters.

I did Google him, you know." "Oh, so you GOOGLED him Oh, well, that changes everything then, doesn't it? What could I possibly worry about now that I know you've conducted such a thorough Internet search?

Don’t know if it’s good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche. This

Google gives preference to its own products, so having a Google+ account influences your search rankings.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

I have googled 'how long does heartbreak last?' The result more popular than that was 'how long does heartburn last?' This implies people suffer from heartburn more than they do heartbreak which is a good thing because heartbreak sucks way fucking more than acid reflux ever could.

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This monopoly of information is a threat to democracy...

Travelling the road will tell you more about the road than the google will tell you about the road.

On the first day of a college you will worry about how will you do inside the college? and at the last day of a college you will wonder what will you do outside the college?

No way do I ever want to try to do anything without my trusty Google search.

Google Search is in fact an advertising platform, not intended to solely serve as a public information resource in the way that, say, a library might. Google creates advertising algorithms, not information algorithms.

Lowe. My friend. My spouse. You’re clearly a competent Were with many talents, but I’ve seen your phone. I’ve seen you use your phone. Half of your gallery is blurry pictures of Ana with your finger blocking the camera. You type ‘Google’ in the Google bar to start a new search.

You can’t search for the answer to questions that haven’t been asked yet. And you can’t Google a new idea. The Internet can only tell us what we already know.

But just to make sure, I went down to the library, switched on the computer and typed ‘vampire vs. werewolf fight winner’ into the Google search browser. The machine whirred for zero point twenty-three seconds before it came up with some four million results. Obviously, I wasn’t the only nutter interested in this stuff. I clicked on the first link and groaned. Over sixty per cent thought a werewolf would kick a vamp’s ass any time. Dammit!

...large technologies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy...

Silver noticed that the areas where Trump performed best made for an odd map. Trump performed well in parts of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, as well as the South. He performed notably worse out West. Silver looked for variables to try to explain this map. Was it unemployment? Was it religion? Was it gun ownership? Was it rates of immigration? Was it opposition to Obama? Silver found that the single factor that best correlated with Donald Trump’s support in the Republican primaries was that measure I had discovered four years earlier. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for “nigger.

Be a true traveller, don't be a temporary tourist.

Summer’s ending and the closest thing I’ve had to an adventure was a Google search of Baja California.

Mr. Frederick .Fitzwilliam’s Google Search History: - How do you kiss if it has been three hundred years since. - How can you know if she wants to kiss you…

I am a firm believer that knowledge is power but only if it leads to comprehension.

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can't search for anything. You can't check your email. You can't watch any videos. You can't get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google's computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

The implications of such marginalization are profound. The insights about sexist and racist biases... are important because information organizations, from libraries to schools and universities to governmental agencies, are increasingly reliant on being displaced by a variety of web-based "tools" as if there are no political, social, or economic consequences of doing so.

within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust the Google search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: searching for relevant and trustworthy information. We no longer search for information. Instead, we google

Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it's not just a magnet for the curious. It's a sinkhole for the gullible. It renders everyone an instant expert. You have a degree? Well, I did a Google search!

Google creates advertising algorithms, not information algorithms.

I've googled OCD about 45 times so far today.

My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.

Today I Googled God. How happy He must be that I am searching for Him.

According to Google statistics, people search the word "money" four times as often as the word "goal". This creates a word: "frustration".

Real search is about providing valuable information when it’s really needed to those who are actually looking for it.

Search engines finds the information, not necessarily the truth.

The state with the highest rate of Google searches for self-induced abortions is Mississippi, a state with roughly three million people and, now, just one abortion clinic.

This couldn’t be...did women really...? She must be wearing it wrong, because good God in heaven! It was horrible! Was the little string supposed to... She took it off, went to her laptop and Google searched “how to wear a thong.” No, she hadn’t put it on wrong. She tried again. Ow. Fantastic. This was just a twenty-five dollar version of a severe wedgie. She picked up her phone and called Allison. “Hey, Allison, I—” “You’ll get used to it,” Allison said

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Google, his mother says. The new new found land. Not so long ago it was only the mentally deranged, the unworldly pedants, the imperialists and the naivest of schoolchildren who believed that encyclopaediae gave you any equivalence for the actual world, or any real understanding of it. And door-to-door salesmen sold them, and they were never to be trusted. And even the authorized encyclopaediae, even them we never mistook for or accepted as any real knowledge of the world. But now the world trusts search engines without a thought. The canniest door-to-door salesmen ever invented. Never mind foot in the door. Already right at the heart of the house.

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Damnú air." "You're cussing!" "I refuse to admit to uttering bad words in any language." Patrick grinned and his teeth flashed white. "Jenny has been Googling German insults. I don't want her to look up Gaelic next." Oh Lord. I tried not to think about what kind of information Jenny discovered in her search. "You let her Google curse words?" "She said it was for educational purposes." "Yeah, right. You are so fired as the baby-sitter.

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again). Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life. Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to travel was the hope that, in a bookstore in Oregon, I might finally track down a book I'd been wanting for years. All of this searching and tracking down was immensely time-consuming – but only in the way that being alive is time-consuming.

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He’s a scientist. He’s never cried. He flips through Googled image searches of burn victims while he touches himself.

Even in an age where the answer to almost all of life’s questions is a simple Google search away, we often don’t take the time to read the entire article for the answer. We don’t make time to actively seek out the truth, only the first or most relevant result.

A billion hours ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged. A billion minutes ago, Christianity began. A billion seconds ago, the IBM personal computer was released. A billion Google searches ago… was this morning. —HAL VARIAN, GOOGLE’S CHIEF ECONOMIST, DECEMBER 20, 2013

At its most basic level semantic search applies meaning to the connections between the different data nodes of the Web in ways that allow a clearer understanding of them than we have ever had to date.

Boys are rewarded for playing games where they line up by height and then run into walls. Perhaps I'm making that up--or perhaps you should do a Google search for "Guy Runs into Wall for Fun." Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse. From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman's body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it's an amusement park. From forty-five on, it's a terrarium. Bring your sense of humor with you at all times. Bring your friends with a sense of humor. If their friends have a sense of humor, invite them, too

In June 2014, a sixteen-year-old teen named Peaches Monroee made a six-second video in which she called her eyebrows “on fleek,” meaning “good” or “on point.” In November, just five months after Monroee posted her video, nearly 10 percent of all Google searches worldwide were for “on fleek.

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Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

Search is the means through which we navigate the Web. If your business is not visible in search it is difficult for it to be found by your customers. Search, above all else, is marketing, and it is undergoing a massive change.

What happens when the YA thriller writer heroine tries to get thru airport security with her research notes in her bag? : “How to murder people by poison without detection,” the TSA agent read aloud. The woman behind Colbie gasped in horror. “Okay,” Colbie said, pointing to them. “That’s not what it looks like.” The woman behind her, cradling a leopard-print cat carrier, had turned and was frantically whispering to the people behind her. “Really,” Colbie said. “It’s a funny story, actually.” But the agent was flipping through her notes, not even remotely interested in her funny story. He didn’t need to read aloud what he was looking at, because she knew exactly what was there – other Google searches, such as how to get away with murder using a variety of different everyday products that weren’t considered weapons. “It’s research,” she said to the room. "Yeah, that’s probably what I’d say too,” a guy said from somewhere behind her.

The notion that Google/ Alphabet has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must be contextualized in the historical conditions that both create and are created by it.

He was boring…well, he still kind of is.” She smirks like she just gave him a jab that he could really hear. “All work and no play. Until you. Why do you think the press went so wild? They’ve been trying to catch him with a woman for years, then he’s running all over town with one. Trust me, he’s not boinking the secretary. I’ve known him since college, and I’d never even seen him date until he met you.” I know that’s true. I’d done my shameful Google search the first time I’d met him. It had come up with nothing. Never

Recently, the Google Internet search "Diwali greetings" was the second-most popular search worldwide during Diwali.

What we learn from behavior economics is that the moment a metric is created it generates an incentive for people to pursue it.

If Google isn’t responsible for its algorithm, then who is?

Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call “high culture”—like knowledge of Goethe’s inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour. There

By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person. This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl. I used internet forums to assess if this was a problem for anyone else. I searched ‘can’t tell people I’m’ and Google suggested: ‘gay’ and ‘pregnant’.

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Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google’s actual, profitable, monetisable product. “Search” is merely Google’s front end, a brilliant facade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google’s “customers” or even Google’s “users”, but its feudal livestock.

It’s still searching Google,” I told Grover. “Perhaps, O Arrow, you could do a Boolean search, ‘strix plus defeat.’” I USE NOT SUCH CHEATS! the arrow thundered. Then it was silent long enough to type strix + defeat.

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Shockingly, the Deep Web is a massive five hundred times larger than the surface Web you use and search every day. While the Deep Web contains seventy-five hundred terabytes of information, the Googleable universe contains a paltry nineteen terabytes. According to a study published in Nature, Google captures no more than 16 percent of the surface Web and misses all of the Deep Web. As a result, when you search Google, you are only seeing 0.03 percent (one in three thousand pages) of the information that actually exists and would be available online

By performing a simple Google search, a website review, a visit to their LinkedIn profile, or a media release search on the person you are about to meet, you can find out where they’ve been, what they care about, and where they’re going. Whether you learn an interesting fact about a hobby they enjoy, the breed of their dog, or something you both have in common, it will show that you took the time to research and that you care about them as a person.

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Don't search for answers. I felt like I was always searching. Literally -- when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time--and feel worse.

Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.

With your permission you give us more information about you, your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less guess what you're thinking about.

Kat gushes about Google's projects, all revealed to her now. They are making a 3-D web browser. They are making a car that drives itself. They are making a sushi search engine -- here she pokes a chopstick down at our dinner -- to help people find fish that is sustainable and mercury-free. They are building a time machine. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.

If you tell Google that you would like to see images of ‘Black men’ the images that come up are all portrait photos of black men. Indeed, it takes more than a dozen rows of images before anybody who isn’t black comes up in the images. By contrast a search for ‘White men’ first throws up an image of David Beckham – who is white – but then the second is of a black model. From there every line of five images has either one or two black men in the line-up. Many of the images of white men are of people convicted of crimes with taglines such as ‘Beware of the average white man’ and ‘White men are bad’.

Pay-Pal.” People wrote down “payments.” He said “Google.” People wrote down “search.” He said “eBay” and they wrote “auctions.” After a few more companies, he said “Yahoo.” He collected the thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo. Everybody had a different word. What was Yahoo trying to be? No one inside the company knew anymore.

Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Google Harry Potter *

Google controls two-thirds of the US search market. Almost three-quarters of all Internet users have Facebook accounts. Amazon controls about 30% of the US book market, and 70% of the e-book market. Comcast owns about 25% of the US broadband market. These companies have enormous power and control over us simply because of their economic position. They all collect and use our data to increase their market dominance and profitability. When eBay first started, it was easy for buyers and sellers to communicate outside of the eBay system because people’s e-mail addresses were largely public. In 2001, eBay started hiding e-mail addresses; in 2011, it banned e-mail addresses and links in listings; and in 2012, it banned them from user-to-user communications. All of these moves served to position eBay as a powerful intermediary by making it harder for buyers and sellers to take a relationship established inside of eBay and move it outside of eBay.

We obviously don’t live in a perfect world. If we did, then my dad would never have volunteered for Vietnam so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college, Uncle Google would have more important things to do than searching for eight hundred million reasons why our schools suck, and I wouldn’t be at an education leadership conference in Jakarta because there’d be no need for it … right?

One of its major recent thrusts has been to place a greater priority on what it calls the “freshness” of the pages it recommends. Google not only identifies new or revised Web pages much more quickly than it used to—it now checks the most popular sites for updates every few seconds rather than every few days—but for many searches it skews its results to favor newer pages over older ones.

So can I ask you a question?” She wraps a strand of hair around her finger and examines the end of it before dropping it to look at me. “Sure.” I pass a slow-moving BMW and get comfortable, glancing at her to continue. “Does the FBI monitor Google searches? Like, um, randomly? For normal people?” “Normal people?” “Non-criminal people.” “What kind of a question is that?” “It’s a real question!” “But why are you asking it?” “Because I Google some weird shit,” she says, blowing out a breath and shaking her head. “I keep expecting someone to show up on my doorstep and ask what the heck I’m doing, but I’m just a really curious person and all the answers are right there, you know? Just click, click and there’s your answer.” “I think you’ll be okay,” I assure her.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

No one has been able to aggregate more intention data on what consumers like than Google. Google not only sees you coming, but sees where you’re going. When homicide investigators arrive at a crime scene and there is a suspect—almost always the spouse—they check the suspect’s search history for suspicious Google queries (like “how to poison your husband”). I suspect we’re going to find that U.S. agencies have been mining Google to understand the intentions of more than some shopper thinking about detergent, but cells looking for fertilizer to build bombs. Google controls a massive amount of behavioral data. However, the individual identities of users have to be anonymized and, to the best of our knowledge, grouped. People are not comfortable with their name and picture next to a list of all the things they have typed into the Google query box. And for good reasons. Take a moment to imagine your picture and your name above everything you have typed into that Google search box. You’ve no doubt typed in some crazy shit that you would rather other people not know. So, Google has to aggregate this data, and can only say that people of this age or people of this cohort, on average, type in these sorts of things into their Google search box. Google still has a massive amount of data it can connect, if not to specific identities, to specific groups.

As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” It’s a principle he’s tried to apply at Google. When Page and Sergey Brin began wondering aloud about developing ways to search the text inside of books, all of the experts they consulted said it would be impossible to digitize every book. The Google cofounders decided to run the numbers and see if it was actually physically possible to scan the books in a reasonable amount of time. They concluded it was, and Google has since scanned millions of books. “I’ve learned that your intuition about things you don’t know that much about isn’t very good,” Page said. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.

Search the most weird thing on Google. You will find some people somewhere doing that thing. Your mind is even more advanced than Google. Whatever you want to believe, it can churn out logic to support that. Look at human history, most brilliant minds have died debating over their beliefs and no common conclusion has been reached so far. And it will never be reached. Mind is tricky machine that can complete any task that you assign it Give it the task of dissolving itself and it will dissolve itself with its own logic. Then you can experience the oneness - the Paramatma.

40. Be Defiant In our opinion, most search engine optimization (SEO) is bullshit. It involves trying to read Google’s mind and then gaming the system to make Google find crap. There are three thousand computer science PhDs at Google trying to make each search relevant, and then there’s you trying to fool them. Who’s going to win? Tricking Google is futile. Instead, you should let Google do what it does best: find great content. So defy all the SEO witchcraft out there and focus on creating, curating, and sharing great content. This is what’s called SMO: social-media optimization.

Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it. Passion is more than résumé-deep, because its hallmarks—persistence, grit, seriousness, all-encompassing absorption—cannot be gauged from a checklist. Nor is it always synonymous with success. If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal. (This is one reason we value athletes, because sports teach how to rebound from loss, or at least give you plenty of opportunities to do so.) The passionate person will often talk at length, aka ramble, about his pursuits. This pursuit can be professional. In our world, “perfecting search” is a great example of something people can spend an entire career on and still find challenging and engaging every day. But it can also be a hobby.

Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

Over the past several months, Amelía’s Google history had become a reference of her despair: “can’t have children, reasons for infertility in women, reasons for infertility in men, discussing infertility with husband, price of surrogate mothers, signs of depression, adoption agencies, infertility support groups…” The endless searches only provided two categories of results: medical sites that took pride in listing every worst-case scenario, and blogs written by white women with phrases like “silent suffering” and “living with uncertainty,” mixing in Bible verses about God’s Grace, none of which filled the void or helped Aimee ignore the fact that Mother’s Day was a month away and she would have to watch her family celebrate the one thing she wanted most and might never have.

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors “who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography.” Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it’s also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio.

Here’s how a filter bubble works: Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe. In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before. Facebook follows suit, presenting a curated view of your “friends’” activities in your feed. Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning. Only

Here are some practical Dataist guidelines for you: ‘You want to know who you really are?’ asks Dataism. ‘Then forget about mountains and museums. Have you had your DNA sequenced? No?! What are you waiting for? Go and do it today. And convince your grandparents, parents and siblings to have their DNA sequenced too – their data is very valuable for you. And have you heard about these wearable biometric devices that measure your blood pressure and heart rate twenty-four hours a day? Good – so buy one of those, put it on and connect it to your smartphone. And while you are shopping, buy a mobile camera and microphone, record everything you do, and put in online. And allow Google and Facebook to read all your emails, monitor all your chats and messages, and keep a record of all your Likes and clicks. If you do all that, then the great algorithms of the Internet-of-All-Things will tell you whom to marry, which career to pursue and whether to start a war.’ But where do these great algorithms come from? This is the mystery of Dataism. Just as according to Christianity we humans cannot understand God and His plan, so Dataism declares that the human brain cannot fathom the new master algorithms. At present, of course, the algorithms are mostly written by human hackers. Yet the really important algorithms – such as the Google search algorithm – are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole. Moreover, with the rise of machine learning and artificial neural networks, more and more algorithms evolve independently, improving themselves and learning from their own mistakes. They analyse astronomical amounts of data that no human can possibly encompass, and learn to recognise patterns and adopt strategies that escape the human mind. The seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.

because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped it up. “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. “But googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.”157 It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.IX Page and Brin pushed to make Google better in two ways. First, they deployed far more bandwidth, processing power, and storage capacity to the task than any rival, revving up their Web crawler so that it was indexing a hundred pages per second. In addition, they were fanatic in studying user behavior so that they could constantly tweak their algorithms.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.