Google as an all-seeing force in the universe

Yahoo! is the internet's most trafficked site. Yet, it continues to lag far behind Google in the all-important "search engine" market, despite this built-in advantage. Yahoo's inability to make up ground on Google's search engine market share was big part of Yahoo's stunning 22 percent decline in stock price last Wednesday.

Yahoo's search engine woes have also resulted in a little soul-searching of my own.

Why is it that I go to Yahoo! for most of my email, a good chunk of my news and all of my fantasy sports (a topic I have been banned from discussing on this space,) but still hop right over to Google any time I want to find information on say ... Yahoo's bad stock day last week?

To answer that questions I was forced to examine the tenets of my faith.

I've never been much of believer. The idea that some being, no matter how divine, could keep track of the comings and goings of up to 5 billion people never gelled with my better sense. Whenever someone told me it was possible, I'd think them a bit of a fool.

That was until the first time I used a search engine. What I was searching for, I have no idea, but it was late enough in the search engine game that about 50 million hits came up in about .26 seconds.

If this machine, made by mortal man, could do so many relevant computations in so little time, suddenly the idea an of all-seeing divine force that lived up in the sky wasn't so silly.

This possibility made me feel warm and good. Since I had done my first search on Google, that search engine acquired a certain providence, in my mind.

It helped the word "Google" sounds to me like a combination of heavenly and earthly infinitude.

"Yahoo!" sounds like a good place to check your email and play fantasy sports.