There was this notion that was popular way back that if you could ask a sufficiently large number of people a question--"sufficiently large" being defined as a major fraction of humanity--you could tap into an archetypical database, sort of Jung's "racial subconscious", and get back deeply-meaningful answers. These answers come not from the sum of what people know, but the whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts formed by all these consciousnesses linked together. In other words, this metaphorical "Delphic Oracle" could provide answers that no individual could.

I think that Google might be becoming a realization of the "Delphic Oracle" notion. It's indexed trillions of items of information by now, contributed by close to a billion people, and Google knows what's on peoples' minds. If you phrase the question right, Google can tell you about trends and deep currents of thought, the zeitgeist of humanity. The "Oracle at Google game" amounts to trying to read humanity's collective mind by asking Google the right questions.

So on the surface those loopy factoids seem crazy, but what if they really do tap into something meaningful? Do people in general really associate "Nazi" with "Republican" more often than "Soviet" with "Democrat"? Do people in general really believe that Republicans are 110% more shitheaded than Democrats? Is the Pope Catholic?