WHEN OEDIPUS needed some answers, urgently, he consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Today he would merely log in to Google. (Of course, the King of Thebes would have to be careful with his search terms: type in “sex with Mummy” or “Dad-killing” and you get some very unpleasant results out of the world’s favourite search engine.) Google is the modern Oracle, the all-knowing mechanical sage we consult to find, if not the answers to life’s questions, then at least a comfortable, reasonably priced hotel in Torquay. But is Google God?

Thomas Freidman, the New York Times columnist, posed this question two years ago. The broad answer was negative: Google may have all the answers but, unlike God, lots of Google’s answers tend to be wrong, loopy postings from lonely people typing late at night in their underwear. Google moves in mysterious ways all right, but some of those ways are downright weird.

That was before Google invented a new algorithm that took the search engine an enormous step closer to divinity. Last week, the company filed worldwide patents on a system enabling it to rank news search results not just by date and relevance, but by veracity and quality.

Google will not only be omniscient, but supposedly trustworthy; not just a reference guide, but a machine that urges the user to believe in it, to have faith, to trust in Google.

Patent WO 2005/029368 may fundamentally change our relationship with the internet. At the moment, when you type a word search into Google, the company’s search engine throws out thousands of “hits” linked to various sources of information; these hits are ranked by relevance (ie, how often the search keyword appears) and how recently the item appeared on the net.

Under the new system, by contrast, Google will build a database comparing the credibility of sources, and ranking the results according.

Credibility is hard to quantify, but not impossible. The Google formula will assess and monitor news sources according to a number of variables: length of story, number of bylines, how long the source has been in business, volume of internet traffic to the site, variety of countries accessing the site, size of staff and so on. The Google database will take all these parameters, and apply a formula that distils them down to a single value. In theory, this will produce a pyramid of information with the most believable at the apex: The Times and the BBC at the top, the Daily Sport and Jeffrey Archer at the bottom, and the Downing Street dossier on Iraq somewhere below that.

The formula will eventually be applicable not just to news, but to all sources of information: each item on a page of results will be deemed to be more trustworthy than the item below it.

Where Google goes, other search engines will follow. All the gods will soon be competing, each claiming a monopoly on the truth, as gods always have.

Even before the patenting of the qualitative algorithm, Google was edging close to divinity, or at least information infinity (Google is a play on the word googol, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros).

The Google database currently receives more than 200 million requests for information every day, in some 89 languages, and sends back answers in billions of web pages and trillions of words. Bodleian Library is teaming up with Google to digitise and download its collection; soon, the whole of human knowledge will be accessible online. Google is also on the verge of becoming omnipresent, thanks to wi-fi, the technology that allows mobile devices to plug into the internet anywhere. “If I can operate Google I can find anything. Google is like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere,” declared Alan Cohen, vice-president of a wireless technology company, with the breathlessness of the apostle. “For many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you do it without wires.” Even the company’s stated role, to “do no evil”, has the ring of piety.

Some have even wondered whether Google is a window into the mind of God, since it monitors, reflects and records the preoccupations and questions of mankind, God’s finest creation. This peculiar notion means that last week God was thinking, in order of priority, about Mother’s Day, the Kentucky Derby, Orlando Bloom, Paula Abdul and the new Xbox 360. He also thinks about Himself a great deal, but mostly He thinks about sex.

In the space of seven years, Google has become a verb, a habit, a way of thinking, and for many a sort of informational crutch. People Google one another before going on dates. They Google themselves by way of selfaffirmation. They use it, just as Oedipus consulted the Oracle, to try to find out where they come from — genealogy is second only to pornography in internet popularity. Joe Janes, who teaches a university course on Google at Washington University, believes that over time people can develop a relationship with Google, the deus in machina: “There are clearly a lot of people who spend a lot of time with it and feel close to it.”

Until now, however, Google made no claim to truth. That is what made it so intriguing, and so infuriating. A Google search produced much that was useful and interesting, along with reams of utter nonsense. It was up to the user to sift out the chaff. The qualitative algorithm changes all that: instead of treating the results with healthy scepticism, Google-buffs will be asked to believe.

Which brings us back to Sophocles and poor old Oedipus. Having been taunted that his Corinthian parents were not his own, Oedipus consulted the Oracle to find the truth. But the Oracle was Delphic; it ignored his question, and instead prophesied that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Therefore, instead of returning home to Corinth where his assumed parents lived, Oedipus headed for Thebes: the man that he killed in self-defence on the way turned out to be his father, the woman he wed in Thebes, his own mother. A nasty business altogether.

The moral for Googlers: be careful what you ask the oracle, and beware how you interpret the “truth” of the results. And while you’re about it, why not check your birth certificate online before you get married to that nice widow?

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