In the late 1930s, as humans managed to launch yet another war that would fail to end all wars, H.G. Wells wrote a series of essays laying out a plan for a better world. Wells, a novelist, reformer and sometime historian, believed that technology could connect people in ways that had never before been possible, joining them in a network and uniting their wisdom into a kind of synaptic and singular mind. The structure Wells imagined would be, he declared, “a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared."

Wells’s “World Brain” would, sadly, remain unrealized in his lifetime. But the World Wide Web, built decades later on the foundations of the military-industrial Internet, was created for the express purpose of sharing ideas and connecting people around them—for building, essentially, a global mind of the sort envisioned by Wells. The web has since been organized (and, in some sense, humanized) by search engines operating under the assumption that information is, fundamentally, a means of connection.


Today, thanks to Google, the most dominant of those engines, we have a tool that taps into humanity’s hive mind better than anything Wells could have imagined. We have snapshots of the information people seek when there’s no barrier between them and their curiosity save for an open field and a flashing cursor. We have … Autocomplete.

And Autocomplete offers much more than insight into people’s queries about love (“why is love … so hard/important/so complicated”) and life (“will life ever … get better/be like star trek”) and mysterious rashes (“on face/on neck/on arms/on legs”). When it comes to politics, Google’s crowdsourced search predictions are shockingly revealing, offering largely unmediated insights into people’s investigations and observations of their elected officials: think of them as real-time push polls accessible and viewed by millions. Think the public is full of high-minded individuals who, in the privacy of their own browsers, turn to Google to understand the intricacies of our political system? Nope. It turns out many of us would rather know if, say, Secretary of State John Kerry has had plastic surgery than whether he’s about to clinch a deal with Iran. The burning question about House Speaker John Boehner? Why he cries so often. About New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker? Whether he’s gay.

Autocomplete is a microinteraction—a minor feature that has come to define, and standardize, our approach to the Internet—that ends up making some macro points about the American political system. And, like so many things built on the Internet, it manages also to be extremely meta. Type a term into Google’s search bar—or, actually, type just part of that term—and you get, instantly, a little summary, ranked and snapshotted, of all the other search terms that have been entered into that same little box. Autocomplete is the collective questioning of the world, transformed into text. It is the curiosity of the Internet … made into Internet curiosities. It is glorious.

***

The auto-generated returns can offer, at turns, melancholy and hilarity and poetry and paranoia. But Autocomplete is more than simply a freeze-framed insight into the pulsing, pining soul of the world. Focused on politics, it can also be a kind of choose-your-own adventure story, courtesy of your clicks. So if I type, say, “Barack Obama is…” into Google’s search field, I am presented (depending on my browser and its configuration) with four options:

At which point I click on “a reptile,” obviously. Which connects me, if I click on the top return, to a helpfully named website, educate-yourself.org ( dot-org!), the tagline of which is “The Freedom of Knowledge, The Power of Thought ©” and the body of which contains a lengthy analysis, based on a childhood photo of our 44 th president, attempting to prove Obama’s status as a reptilian humanoid. It is not convincing.

The point, however, is that—thanks to Google’s aggregations of questions—I have found myself here on educate-yourself.org, and, now that I have done so, I can, indeed, educate myself—not necessarily about the president’s supposed lizard brain, but about my fellow Americans’ examinations of the alleged lizardry. Google, in giving me a peek inside its cyborg-style mind, has taught me that there have been enough people who have been curious about the president’s status not just as an American, but as a human, that their curiosity has become publicly associated with searches about the president. And that curiosity, with the help of Autocomplete’s infrastructure, has compounded as people like me—people who wonder not about Obama’s humanity, but about those who would think to question it—click on “reptilian.”

And on and on it can go—ad infinitum and, occasionally, ad nauseam.

Start to investigate the politics of Autocomplete and you head down a road with a mind-boggling array of possible iterations. You can take a similarly forking path with Hillary Clinton (“evil,” “bi,” “communist”) and Joe Biden (“an idiot,” “a moron,” “from,” “dead,” “a dumbass”) and Ted Cruz (“an idiot,” “Canadian,” “crazy,” “a jerk,” “a moron”). Search, click, site-surf (and then, should you choose, browse another site, and then another) … until you have gotten a synaptic education about the political wonderings and wanderings of your fellow citizens.

Even with Barack Obama, the reptilian path is far from the only road to take. Omitting the “Barack” in the search yields “gay,” “an idiot,” “a muslim,” “a liar.” Or you can add “why does” to your query about our president, to revealing effect:

You can also wonder:

And wait:

And wish you were more civically engaged:

What you’ll find, across your searches, is a mix of motivations: Some people are seeking pure information or dirt or ammunition for their next dinner-party debate. But many others, it seems, are seeking conversation. They’re looking not so much for data as for community. “HealthCare.gov is a joke” is, of course, not a query. But it is a search. The series of words is in fact a seeking of like minds—the quick-and-dirty result of people looking for people who think that HealthCare.gov is as much of a joke as they do. Birds of a feather, Googling together.

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Google launched Autocomplete in 2004. Back then, it was called “Google Suggest”— then-Googler Marissa Mayer gave it the name—and it was an experimental feature that had arisen from the 20 percent time of then-Google engineer Kevin Gibbs. “We've found,” Gibbs wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature, “that Google Suggest not only makes it easier to type in your favorite searches (let's face it—we're all a little lazy), but also gives you a playground to explore what others are searching about, and learn about things you haven't dreamt of.”

Google Suggest, which started life as an opt-in feature, would remain that way for four more years—until, in 2008, Google made it the default search mode on both Google.com and on the company's mobile apps, maps, and browsers. In 2010, Google rebranded the feature as Google Instant, expanding its usage, and its impact, to the more than a billion daily searches then conducted on its platform. Today, Autocomplete is largely associated with Google, but its logic stretches far beyond Google. Facebook uses a version of it. So does Twitter. It’s an Autocompleted world; we’re just living in it.

Autocomplete, in other words, is a productivity aid that has ended up influencing the way people interact with the Internet—and not just with information, but also with each other. The signals Google uses to inform its instant returns are part of that. The popularity of searches largely determines those returns (hence, “Rob Ford is awesome”/”Rob Ford is fat”) … but Google also accounts for more incidental information—language and location and a searcher’s personal web history—when serving up its suggestions. Autocomplete, like Google itself, is fundamentally global—but it also tries to make the global just a little bit personal. It recognizes that information and interaction are intimately related.

And it recognizes, in its way, that politics isn’t just about vitriol and invective, about getting your opinion heard. It can be that, certainly (“Nancy Pelosi is … hot/a moron/evil”). But politics, at its core, is also about community. And on the Internet, one small strain of civic engagement can simply be to reach out into the Internet’s ether and find people who, like you, think that Barack Obama is reptilian. That Ted Cruz is Canadian. That Hillary Clinton is evil. You could talk about echo chambers—about the Internet’s ability to help like find like, with very little friction in the process—but these snapshotted suggestions suggest connection, too. Autocomplete is what happens when, alone with a World Brain and a blank box that is connected to it, you type in a thought and realize that others have been thinking …

the same thing

a related thing

something totally different

something totally revealing

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic.