Daniel Soar reviews ‘The Googlisation of Everything (and Why We Should Worry)’ by Siva Vaidhyanathan, ‘In the Plex’ by Steven Levy and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ by Douglas Edwards · LRB 6 October 2011
Google is getting cleverer precisely because it is so big. If it’s cut down to size then what will happen to everything it knows? That’s the conundrum. It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?