It's All Like... What?

Google phrase searches can produce results that seem like random answers to a Rorschach test—only more amusing. Here are the top results (on a day in July 2008) for “The Internet is like...”:

  • “a vast uncataloged library”

  • “a vagina”

  • “Joey Bishop”

  • “a series of tubes”

  • “Microsoft”

  • “alcohol in some sense”

  • “a newspaper”

  • “going down the Chinese road”

Closer to home, “Linux is like...”:

  • “switching from a car to a motorcycle”

  • “a pizza”

  • “ice cream—too many flavors to choose”

  • “a fixed-wheel bicycle”

  • “turning on your first computer and figuring out what all those weird boxes did”

  • “a common cold”

  • “a whole new species”

  • “Ubuntu, only different”

Our hat tip for this observation goes to reader Mike Warot.

Doc Searls is editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, where he has been on the masthead since 1996. He is also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Basic Books, 2000, 2010), author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), a fellow of the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow of the Berkman Klien Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He continues to run ProjectVRM, which he launched at the BKC in 2006, and is a co-founder and board member of its nonprofit spinoff, Customer Commons. Contact Doc through ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

Load Disqus comments