The Original Search Engine
In Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, University College London lecturer in English Dennis Duncan dives deeply into a humble feature of modern books. The index’s existence is both taken for granted and the essential precursor to the ubiquitous search engines that govern life today.
His dogged research traces how the index developed over centuries, following the necessary prerequisite of the innovation of page numbers, and evolved from the simple listing of names in biblical concordances into the much more subjective subject index that eventually produced the search terms we now type into Google.
Lenny Picker: How did this book originate?
: I did a Ph.D. on a group called the Oulipo, a French avant-garde collective from the second half of the 20th century. A few years ago, I’m still thinking about the Oulipo, and it struck me that several of their novels have indexes. And I thought I might do an academic. That coincided with this sense, yes, something is changing about the way that we search, whether it’s searching books in class on a Kindle, or whether it’s searching for information on Google.
