How does Google mean?...or: "Everything and More"

No, I'm not going to weigh in on Google's (lack of) aesthetic sense, as demonstrated by the search engine's widely panned and short-lived experiment on Thursday during which a large photograph took the place of the usual plain, white background. Because who cares, really.

No, I'm much more interested in pointing out something that I've noticed over the past month or so that appears to the left of the results of an ordinary Google search. Here's a photo I snapped of it:

Anyone?

What immediately comes to my mind, whenever I glance at this side-bar (which I've done many times) is the title of the only published piece of writing by the late David Foster Wallace that I was never able to make it all the way to the end of. I refer to 2003's Everything and More, subtitled: A Compact History of Infinity. This book-length essay, intended (naively) for the general reading public, was Wallace's audacious, gimmicky and controversial attempt to explain set theory ("multiple infinities")—created (or maybe 'discovered'?) by the 19th century German mathematician Georg Cantor—without really using any actual math.

But, more than Wallace's book, it just strikes me that the words and hyperlinks featured in the above snapshot amount to a kind of smart-ass collage or accidental poem. In other words, with your initial search, Google is providing you with "everything." Should "everything" fail to sate your appetite for page upon page of relevant* material, follow the hyperlink, for Google offers you still "more" than mere infinity.

I guess I'm really just thinking about a constellation of things. First, the fact that we don't often talk about Web pages in ways that take account of how arrangements of words, images and—for example—navigational functions impact conveyed meaning. This can encompass both "intentional" and "unintentional" meanings; it can refer to the ways in which words, images and hyperlinks function as collages of juxtapositions, oppositions and organizational schemes. Furthermore, meaning is impacted not only by what exists on the Web page but by what is left out. Finally, meaning is shaped by the sets of expectations that users bring to bear when using a Web page. This is particularly interesting in reference to search engines, in the case of which the user's attention is almost always focused upon the expectation that he or she will encounter immediately thereafter a spectrum of (categories of?) content.

And, of course, there's the Marshall McLuhan-esque question: what, after all, do I mean when I refer to the "content" with which we expect a search engine to "connect" us?

All right. Hope that makes some kind of sense. Time for bed.

ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that there's significance as regards user-expectations to be attached to the basic function of a search engine: (i) the sheer act of typing words into Google's interface signifies the expectation/intention of obtaining information, data or some other kind of non-tangible artifact, whose 'form' and to some extent, 'content', must be fixed or predictable to you—otherwise (i.e., were results to provide inscrutable artifacts or incomprehensible information), how could you anticipate that the results might have any value to you?; and (ii) usually, the object or objects of a search are characterized simultaneously and to an equal degree by a basic lack of familiarity—otherwise, why would you need to "search" for it in the first place?

In both i and ii are to be found the complicated interplay of contradictions between 'form' and 'content', as well as between anticipated familiarity and anticipated unfamiliarity. In an Internet search, one's capacity to comprehend and derive use from unfamiliar content is conditioned by one's reasonable expectation of familiarity of form.

(Here are some more quotations and aphorisms from the late, great Marshall McLuhan, some of which deal with the form/content dyad.)

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* In the sense of popular and of containing such keywords as are to be found on a given Web location, irrespective of things like context and other 'meaning'-derived metrics.