How Google conquered the world; Paying your bills on a date; and Silicon Valley wants your moments: Best of the Web

“Maps are an absolute necessity of empire,” writes Paul Ford, contributing editor for The New Republic. The explorers of the modern world knew this, and so does Google.
As Ford writes in this essay on how Google took over the world, Google didn’t develop the first online mapping program. But it developed the best.
Google, as a search engine, had built a fine business by ‘indexing’ … documents and making them searchable. The company was built on a principle of centralisation: If you take the chaotic Web and bestow order upon it, merge it into a single consolidated index, make it make sense, you can make users very, very happy.
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