April 18, 2003 10:11 AM

Brad DeLong writes about personal search engines in Shifting Into Overdrive:

The overwhelming cheapness of storage will lead to the apotheosis of librarianship - or, rather, of search. Overwhelmingly cheap storage means that we will save copies of everything. But saved copies of everything are useful only when you can find what you are looking for. I already find it much, much easier to locate things on the publicly accessible part of my hard disk that is www.j-bradford-delong.net than in my private directories.

Why? Google. Other people have omnivorously plowed through the directories opened up to the world, and Google has aggregated the Web traces they have made. Intelligence - artificial or otherwise - at assessing the value of documents and their relevance to you may well become the truly scarce factor. And one of the basic principles of economics is that the truly scarce factor is highly rewarded. Google's children will be a big part of the picture. Tomorrow's movie studio profits may well accrue to the studio that can write the best algorithms to download copies of the 50 films you'd most enjoy to your hard disk overnight.

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