Think The Search Engine Concept is Fairly New?

Think Again…

Vannevar Bush’s article, “As We Man Think”, published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly stated this:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the systems of indexing. … Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association. … Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his own shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.

After that he proposed the idea of a limitless memory storage and retrieval system.

What would he think if he could see the power of the search engines today?