Google is more than the story of some misty, happy start-up. As long as mankind exists, we will now have a digital artifact of what we’ve looked for, and what we’ve found, and what we’ve interacted with. As the Internet swallows all other forms of communication, and all that becomes indexed and tracked, everything we do with it will become knowable, not known but knowable. That is a pretty profound shift in our culture. One that gets to the edge of science fiction. — John Battelle.