"Upload the drive to my socket. Access code 5J55J."

Last night, as I watched Chloe O'Brian crankily data-mining her way through untold terabytes of information to save Jack Bauer's bacon yet again, I found myself thinking about Google. Google is sort of the poor man's Chloe O'Brian--without the attitude that has endeared her to "24" fans.

A lot of people out there have latched onto Google--or the idea of Google--as the answer to their problems.

• The Justice Department argued that court-enforced access to Google's records of individual searches was necessary to enforcement of the Child Online Pornography Act. (The court disagreed.)


• "Certain organs of US intelligence," as a John LeCarre character might put it, long for the day when they have Google-like access to their own case-files and data.


• University faculty hope that Google and similar search engines can give them the edge in the two thousand year-long war against student plagiarism.

And yet, as sophisticated as Google is, there are times when it's clearly not much more than a way to draw surprisingly mistaken conclusions from an amazing amount of information at astonishingly high speed. An accomplishment of sorts, but still . . . .

I've written before about the odd routes by which Google has led some people to p3. I found another delightful example this morning. I guess I'm proud to think that p3 comes up first on a search for "portland whorehouse riots," but as you'll see it's a false-positive. The hapless searcher may have found what they were looking for farther down the results page, in Ruth Rosen's The Lost Sisterhood, although if so it means they were looking for Portland OR's namesake in Maine.

(I wasn't able to find the archived story from that tantalizing KATU link about halfway down the results page; if anyone can get to it, please put the link in the comments section. Thanks.)

One final thing to notice about Google, though--even if you query it about something as dubious as Portland whorehouse riots, the first thing it does is offer help with maps and street addresses. I'm sure that, if Jack had phoned Chloe about a whorehouse riot, she would have immediately downloaded the maps to his PDA.

Google: The poor man's Chloe O'Brian.