The moderator of the presentation, Kevin Werbach, was having trouble getting the audience to focus, because everyone was distracted by a series of seemingly unrelated phrases scrolling by on a giant screen: "Fishing boats. Lesson plans format. ICRA. Woodpecker control. Origin of God." (Google, which derives from the word "googol"-the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros-had set up a live feed of the thirteen million queries that it gets each day.) "Unholy dancers. Drug testing in high schools. Compulsive hoarding. Free wife-swapping stories. Bald. Shaved."

"Let's go to the panel," Werbach said as the scroll continued. "Hopefully, it will be more interesting than seeing the queries.'' That produced a chorus of boos, because it's hard to imagine a computer conference generating anything more exciting than the thrill of watching what the world is trying to find out.