Friday, September 14, 2007

You know, that show where the girl could stop and start time by clapping?

On this day in 2033, Google, Google Earth, and Google Print closed up shop forever. After this day, there were no longer updates of new satellite photos, no more books were scanned, and all of Google's web-crawling spiders were turned off. A year later, the domain expired and quickly became a post-porn site, featuring pictures of women with photoshopped "googly" eyes.

After their deaths in 2064 and 2069, respectively, the personal diaries and correspondence of Larry Page and Sergey Brin were released to the public. It was in these documents that the original impetus behind Google, and many of its subsequent programs, was revealed.

Page and Brin, during their years at Stanford, got caught up in an argument of whether "Out of this World" came on before or after "The Munsters Today". They realized that the only way to ever figure this out was the possibility that someone, someday, might post a fansite dedicated to late-1980s television show line-ups.

After getting the Google search engine in place, Sergey Brin visited his parents in Adelphi, Maryland. While looking through his old toys, he wondered if his favorite soccer ball (upon which he had drawn Jimmy Carter's face) was still on top of the house after being kicked there by his pal Scotty from down the street. His mom still wouldn't let him get on the roof ("In the old country, we were blessed if we had a roof! Walk on a roof! You should sooner walk on a priest! A roof, my God..."), so Brin decided that he'd need to make his own Google plane to get up high enough to see the roof of his house. When Brin mentioned to Page that he was thinking of making a plane, Page ridiculed the idea, saying "Planes are for sissies. You're a sissy!" Thus the inception of Google Earth.

The Google Print collection's purpose was to help Larry Page figure out what book it was he had reas as a kid where this old guy gets all these cats who then proceed to kill each other. As he had spent the summer after high school burning down every library he had visited at that point in his life, he knew it wouldn't be a simple task to track down the book. His solution? Create a full-text searchable digital library of every book ever published.

It turns out that September 13th, 2033, was the day that Page happened across the book "Millions of Cats" in the world's last remaining B. Dalton Bookseller (in Manassas, Virginia). This being the last piece of info that either Page or Brin really cared about knowing (Super Steve's Line-Up Webatorium had been created in 2022 by Steven Petrillo, a botanist from New Jersey) Google's wide array of services, which at that point included Google Hardhats, Google Cheeses, and Google Massage Parlors, was shut down the very next day by Brin and Page.

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