Whimsley: Mr. Google's Guidebook:
... Was I surprised! The biography was a revelation. I don't get out often these days (it's the gout) and I am now woefully out of touch, but it turns out that there is more to Mr. Google than I ever dreamed. He is responsible for an astonishingly popular free publication called Mr. Google's Guidebook. It's one of the most remarkable books you'll ever read - if you open it twice you never see quite the same page. In fact the only book I've ever heard of to match it is a limited edition print called "The Book of Sand" that my friend Mr. Borges had in his library before he went mad.Here is how Mr. Google's Guidebook works.
A long time ago, people used signposts to get where they wanted to go. Each signpost was a little underlined phrase in blue that took you to a new place. People would wander all over the place, hopping from one place to another, looking at signposts to see where to go next. These signposts made a sort of map. The complete map of the world is a very big and complicated thing of course, but here is a little piece of it (thanks to this article).
Mr. Google realized that most people don't really want maps, they want guidebooks. And he also realized how he could use those signposts to build a good guidebook. When someone puts up a signpost it shows that they feel this destination is a place worth going to. Mr. Google's Guidebook is very well indexed, so when you look up something like "I would like to visit a peaceful country retreat" it takes you to a page of recommendations. To generate these recommendations Mr. Google counted all the signposts that pointed to peaceful country retreats and pick those retreats that most signposts pointed to. "Here", he would say, "I recommend you go to Harburn House, or Green Mountain Bed and Breakfast". Mr. Google's Guidebook became something of a sensation. Once it was established, he put in a few advertisements alongside each question and made a pretty penny from it. ...
(Thanks, Henry!)
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