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This week, if the gods and Wall Street smile, the web search company Google will go public and thereby achieve a market value of $30 billion dollars or more. I don't plan to invest, but Google's success does please me.
For one thing, as a search engine, it has always worked better than its competitors, and I always like it anytime quality triumphs in the world.
But I'm also pleased selfishly, because Google is such an awesomely useful tool in ways I happen to care about most. I spend most of my time writing. The book I'm working on now is historical fiction, so I have spent many hundreds of hours doing research. A lot of that has happened in books, but even more of my research, at this point, occurs online.
Every day, dozens of times, I hunt for bits of information on Google, and they are generally pretty arcane bits -- like the size of a particular ship that brought Irish immigrants to New York in March of 1847, or the name of the hero in Charles Baudelaire's short story "Fanfarlo."
Could I write what I write without web search? Of course: I managed to muddle through for a couple of decades without the internet. But now I don't necessarily have to schlep to the library or write a letter to some archive or get on the phone to an historian I've never met every time I need some fact. I can get most of what I need instantly, at my desk, the moment I decide I need it. And sometimes in the process I stumble serendipitously across facts I didn't know I needed, which inspires me on to new narrative zigs, zags and embellishments.
And I realize that what has made Google successful, in addition to its very smart powerful software, is a set of smart, simple design choices.
For starters, they've kept the graphics utilitarian, bare bones, even austere. Unlike any other big-time internet company, the Google.com home page is mostly white -- just 30 words huddled at the top, no photographs, no cascade of data, no jumpy special effects.
When you do a search, the resulting links are displayed very simply, according to their relevance and overall popularity -- not, as some other search engines do, with advertisers' links covertly pushed up top. Google does sell ads - that's why the service is free to you and me -- but instead of masquerading as "pure" information, or flashing and buzzing in your face, Google's ads are visually unobtrusive, and they are clearly ads.
Has any business of this size ever owed quite so much of its success to intelligent graphic design? I don't think so.
What we have here is a virtuous circle. The design creativity of its makers has turned Google into an almost perfect tool -- a tool that in turn lets the creativity of its users thrive. How rare and completely delightful that is. And as far as I'm concerned, worth whatever billions of dollars they rake in this week in the stock market.
