When one entity becomes large and powerful in society it inevitably attracts additional scrutiny from the press, the population, and the legal system, which is overall a healthy phenomenon.

Today one can acquire a flavor of economic intuition—previously only available by sitting in a graduate-school coffee room—by reading blogs and listening to podcasts, and this is true across subjects like statistics and political science.

People have seen the benefits of open systems so the genie is out of the bottle, with growing pushes toward open standards (e.g., European document-exchange standards) and open science, though any open network still requires a viable business model to support it.

The Internet was a lab experiment that got loose: designed only as a communication mechanism among an elite scientific community, its dramatic social impact surprised even its creators, illustrating the universal phenomenon that tools end up having uses their developers never anticipated.

In Washington nobody pays attention to anything that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, in business nobody pays attention to anything that doesn't fit in a one-page memo, and in academia nobody pays attention to anything that doesn't fit on a 40-page document with notes and appendices.

The Internet is not necessarily producing a short attention span; rather it boosts our capabilities, and complaints that technology degrades thought go back to the Greeks complaining writing made the young stupid, with the same charge leveled later at calculators.

Information technology has become much more generic so similar IT is available everywhere, and systems once affordable only to the largest, richest companies (e.g., Walmart's intelligent cash registers, inventory tracking, scan codes) are now available to the smallest mom-and-pop store, democratizing the technology.

Game theoretic modeling of Google's ad auction using very simple techniques yielded a lot of insight, and an econometric analysis showed the data fit the model within four or five percent error, making it one of the great arguments for game theory.

Search systems and users co-evolve: over time users have become more skilled at entering longer, more focused, more qualified queries, which gives the search engine a much better chance of retrieving relevant documents.

Cognitive tools like Google and calculators free the mind to pursue creative thought processes by eliminating routine, mundane tasks.

Because a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention (Herbert Simon), modern search is now all about precision rather than recall, since one can always retrieve thousands of documents; the challenge is ensuring the retrieved documents are the most relevant.

Imposing a constraint like an 850-word column limit improves communication and writing style, analogous to Robert Frost's view that free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

The impressive achievement of Google is not that it searches many sites but that it produces a set of pages the user is likely to want to read, which is an extraordinary achievement combining the human mind with technology.

Google's search algorithm is ultimately based on statistical relationships that are largely language- and meaning-independent, so the same algorithm applied to another language works remarkably well, and it improves as more data and experience accumulate.

Whereas your neighbors' political views are the best predictor of your own creating self-reinforcing local echo chambers, the internet makes the world your neighbor, exposing you to a much larger variety of viewpoints and a better chance of reaching intelligent conclusions.

Search engines enable rapid fact-checking so that audiences can verify in real time what a candidate is saying, which may bring more accuracy into political discourse.

The Internet democratizes data, making information that previously required subscriptions, academic libraries, or insider connections available to anyone in the world.

Although partisan blogs produce solipsistic in-group venting (a negative), the freedom of entry online enables challenge and counter-challenge, as in the global warming debate, and this free open debate is overall one of the great healthy developments of our time.

Technology, infrastructure, and users mutually evolve over time, as illustrated by the automobile: both cars and drivers got better, and what people expected of and did with cars changed dramatically.

Even though IT infrastructure is now easily reproducible across companies, the expertise to make sense of masses of data is not, so firms that invest in data managers, statisticians, and economists who can analyze data will have a competitive advantage in the future.