Google Scribe peers into the Googleplex mind

Back in the early days of the 20th century, when spiritualism and surrealism were leading pleasingly parallel yet very active lives, there was a fad for automatic writing. This involved sitting at a desk with pen and paper and letting your hand write what it wanted - either to act as a receiver for the spirit world, or to unlock the churning thoughts of the subconscious. (which could well be the same thing. But that's another story.)

Google Scribe, announced yesterday, is automatic writing for the Google mind. Enter one word and wait - and it'll suggest another. Press enter and wait, and another will pop up. Keep going, and you'll soon bring up a bizarre collection. Start with Google, and you get:

Google Scholar by J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of the Fathers of the Church of England Primary School...

ZDNet UK gets you:

ZDNet UK Staff Blogs & Tweets that mention The Survival Stationery Office Limited as the Theory of the Firm and the Market

There's a lot of fun picking the right seed words and seeing what transpires, and I expect the first websites of Google Scribe poetry are up already.

So, where does Google get its suggestions from? The company has a huge corpus of text, which it has analysed to death, building probability trees against which it matches search terms in order to rank the next most likely outcomes. That's not too dissimilar to the pattern matching that goes on in human perception and, to some extent, our higher level cognition: from seeing faces in the flames to deciding what film to see, pattern matching on experience and probabilities is woven into our awareness. It's fallible, but interesting.

And that same mechanism is at work in Google Scribe - only, lacking any higher level awareness (as far as we know), it tends towards the automatic.

So, when you're playing with Google Scribe, you really are looking into the Googlemind. Whether it's the subconscious of search or the digital spirit world - well, you decide.