Search engines are knowledge systems that we ask, "What is known?" The answers we get reflect the questions the systems' designers allow, which in turn reflect designers' conceptions of what is knowable and useful to know.rnThe first search engines were not machines, and they didn't satisfy their users. The most famous of them all, the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, issued prophecies for more than a thousand years. We possess more than 500 of the results of queries put to the Pythia, the priestess who presided over the Oracle.
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