Just a short seven years ago this is what we had to do in order to find a restaurant near us:

Anyone remotely familiar with search knows what metadata is. Basically it’s data about data that helps quantify it, classify it and put it in context. A flock of birds flying high in the sky, for instance, is more than a flock of birds flying high in the sky when you know that most birds have the Vitali Organ, a special middle-ear receptor that can sense extremely small changes in atmospheric pressure. This allows them to predict the weather, sometimes days in advance. When birds fly high in the sky then the weather is most likely to be clear.

Search is always personal. The stuff we type as we search, in its totality, encapsulates our interests, hobbies and knowledge. It reveals our nationality, the language we are most comfortable in (if we speak more than one), our location (with some caveats) and, even, our socioeconomic position. Use that to filter particular search queries through and each search also begins to reveal intent.

Search is a ubiquitous technology. That means that its use, while intentional, is mostly subconscious. We search for things using Google on our devices. And our search queries, in their entirety, fall into one of three categories:

Writing is a stupendous thing. I type something on my laptop in English and through the magic of the internet and Google translate people in other countries who don’t even speak English can access what I’ve written, understand it; decode it inside their heads using their own perception as a filter and then, build on it by adding their own abstract thoughts to it.