This sort of practice was inevitable.

In the first stages of general purpose computing, it was about empowering the users — about making their lives better and due to the embedded values of the hippies and weirdos who pioneered personal computing, this stuck for a while.

It means that mobile and desktop searchers will end up seeing different results.

Google is not just launching the mobile search index to run alongside its desktop index, it will become the primary index.

This has nothing to do directly with profit, even. It has to do with control and the primacy of the wish to assert that control to disallow unwelcome freedom and initiative.

Soon the world will be well beyond Orwell — unpermitted thoughts will be impossible to think because any method of discovering those ideas will be controlled by a few companies that are the seigneurs presiding over all culture, deciding what one is allowed to think and what one is not.

Welcome to the future.