The search for a single source of truth

Back in the early 2000s when I worked in IT, I recollect a seminar where a consultant was talking of how Google’s aim was to be able to produce the definitive “One Answer” to any query. This was astonishing aim at that time, when entering a query into a search engine resulted in a mostly unordered list of websites being presented to the user.

A decade or so later, the apparent failure of this aim was signaled in a 2017 The Wall Street Journal article which proclaimed that “Going beyond search, the internet giant is promoting a single result over all others, and many are contentious, improbable or laughably incorrect.”