Amazon organizes retail into a coherent, usable marketplace, to make no mention of it being the largest, most trafficked bookstore in human history; Google culls the entirety of the Web so that we have some sensible progression for considering its offerings; Facebook provides a directory of people, as well as a method for managing social lives. Without these tools, the Internet becomes unusable. “Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel,” the science writer James Gleick has argued.
