Via search-colored lenses.
There's probably little, if any, point in asking whether the ultimate triumph
of the search box over all other browser components is a good, or a bad, thing.
It seems to be happening, and we'll simply have to adjust.
I suppose that it can't hurt that we're streamlining browser functions - we hopefully
learned long ago that having more buttons to push on doesn't make for a better
user experience. One of the most positive aspects of Google in its earliest stages,
after all, was paring down search to one simple box,
rather than cluttering the main search page with superfluous buttons and tools.
And yet, I can't help but sense that accompanying this desirable streamlining
is a much less desirable simplification, a simplification of how we view, and
understand, our world. When we approach any and all information as "searchable",
we may be proclaiming that everything is "findable", but we're also
acknowledging that our world is constructed of two separate components - the world
of what we "know", and beyond that, a world of confusion, of disarray,
a world that rather than begging to be organized or ordered, remains "beyond"
precise definition, and into which we dare tread only in order to extract a snippet
of information here or there, but surely not in order to make it our own.
Go to: Search Rules!