Google’s sheer smartness has changed what we ask of it. Search, the core of Google’s business and presence in our lives, has grown around us and us around it. Then came a pandemic and the only apparent brake mechanism available to health authorities was to keep us at home with only the internet for connection. A lot of online activity began on Google in one way or another, and since then our search activity has reset at a higher level.
At home, we searched not so much for things available on the internet but for what was happening in our...