Amazon Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer

If you had visited the Cambridge University Library in the late 1990s, you might have observed a skinny young man, his face illuminated by the glow of a laptop screen, camping out in the stacks. William Tunstall- Pedoe had wrapped up his studies in computer science several years earlier, but he still relished the musty aroma of old paper, the feeling of books pressing in from every side. The library received a copy of nearly everything published in the United Kingdom, and the sheer volume of information--5 million books and 1.2 million periodicals--inspired him. It was around this time, of course, that another vast repository of knowledge--the internet--was taking shape. Google, with its famous mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," was proudly stepping into its role as librarian to the planet.