Google is forgetting the world before it.

I stumbled on a site called ‘Twitt(url)y‘ that lists the top mentioned URLs in Twitter.  Apparently, the hottest URL is this one: Parasitic Flies Turn Fire Ants Into Zombies.  Catchy.  A quick click takes us to a Yahoo news page telling this somewhat lurid story of a fly whose larvae hollow out ants’ brains and.. and.. you get the picture.

No surprise this story catches the popular imagination.  It’s deliciously shuddersome in a way that links nicely into the Zombie obsession that early teens seem to currently exhibit (thanks in no small part to the legitimised blood-thirstiness of XBox titles like ‘Resident Evil).

But what really interested me is that this story reminded me of one I read when I was just about entering my teens – way, way back in the internet-free mid 1970s.  I read of a virus that entered an ant’s brain, turned it into a zombie, took control and forced the ant to march to the tip of a blade of grass.  There it would wait until a passing sheep grazed it, at which point it would attack the sheep’s nervous system before passing out of the sheep in it’s urine onto the grass at which point the cycle would begin again.

Prompted by Twitt(url)y, I tried to find that old story but Google proved unequal to the task.  The effort reminded me that Google is only useful if you can name the thing you want to find.  It’s a ‘find’ engine. Perfect for shopping, not so good for learning.  By trashing the familiar hierarchies of knowledge that we depended on for most of our history, google-man will lose access to any information that he himself hasn’t named and tagged.

What does that mean? Well it’s hard to understand the significance of the idea until you go to Google and try to find some reference to a piece of information from the pre-Google era and discover it’s no longer accessible.  It may be there (somewhere) but if the means of recovering are inadequate then it is to all intents and purposes history.

So what happened to that story I read all those years ago?  It’s unfindable; gone; soon-to-be forgotten, leaving Yahoo’s shock-horror, most-Twittered story about zombie ants to become breaking news.