Appendix 1. Selection of items from the popular media suggesting how important Google is, according to "mainstream" journalists.

• Google is "a skeleton key to the Internet" (Q. Hardy, Forbes, 2003-05-26). (Full disclosure: I saw the cover of this issue in the gym, and then went home and found the article via Google.)
• Google is "a high-tech version of the Oracle at Delphi ... it’s the modern version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Yellow Pages, and the Social Register, all rolled up into one. ... with the emergence of Google, something profound has happened. Because of its seemingly uncanny ability to provide curious minds with the exact information they seek, a dot-com survivor has supercharged the entire category of search, transforming the masses into data-miners and becoming a cultural phenomenon in the process" (S. Levy, Newsweek, 2002-12-16).
• "Google’s a library, an almanac, a settler of bets. It’s a parlor game, a dating service, a shopping mall. It’s a Microsoft rival. It’s a verb" (M. Malone, Wired, 2004-03).
• Google has changed the way the world finds things out, and enticed it to look for things previously considered unfindable" (S. Levy, Newsweek, 2004-03-29).
• "Google has made knowledge a habit," says Barbara Quint, librarian and editor of Search Magazine, quoted in the San Jose Mercury News, 2003-05-04.
• "Google has written rules that have changed the way we interact with the Internet, with knowledge in general, and even with each other" (D. LaGesse, US News and World Report, 2004-05-10).
• "A wider path, I think, has never been beaten in the history of the world." (Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, speaking of Google).
• "Google is the first [search engine] to become a utility, a basic piece of societal infrastructure like the power grid, sewer lines and the Internet itself ... If information is power, then Google has helped change the world.... Google works. Google knows" (science writer Joel Achenbach in BizReport.com [2004-02-16])

"Is Google God?" asks Thomas Friedman in The New York Times [2003-06-29]). He quotes Alan Cohen, a Vice President of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider, who muses: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything... Google, when combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything."