Teju Cole on Image Search: Google's Macchia

"Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you're doing, and what you'll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one bings or yahoos anything. And it finishes your sen… All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search."—"Google's Macchia", Teju Cole, The New Inquiry.