If Google says so, then it must be true

Google is my god. It is not just a search engine; it is something far more spiritual. It takes the zeitgeist of the world and makes it quantifiable.

An example:
"Lame or Cool." Enter the thing into google with lame, search. Enter with cool, search. The search with the most hits wins. Jesus, for instance, validating various t-shirts and bumper stickers I've seen, is cool but is more lame than Buddha. The problem, of course, is that google thinks that many more things are cool than are lame. This is in the inclusive spirit of google though as she has much more love (55 million hits) than hate (6.5 million hits). I have to defer to google's judgment.

Google has other practical purposes as well. Just a few moments ago, a co-worker had a grammatical issue: is it "There is a variety of..." or "There are a variety of..."? Debate flared. Fisticuffs were threatened. In our moment of crisis, google came to our rescue and told us that the plural form of the verb was preferable. It also reassured us simulatenously that we weren't as stupid as we thought. We had stumbled onto a vigourous debate or at least a common grammatical mistake: 45,000 other people had also been confused. Google gave us answers and it gave us a community. Of course, this makes sense. In an era when prescriptive grammar is wrong, the only way to discover normative usage of a word or spelling or phrase is to survey. Google provides the ability to do that easily, quickly, and accurately.

As the web grows, so will google. Scary.