Welcome To History 2.0

October was a busy news month. Iraq smoldered. California elected Arnold, then burned. Kobe hit the docket. But my bet is that in a hundred years, people, if there are any, will agree that the biggest story was the one that appeared on the computer screens of millions who made routine visits to the online superstore Amazon.com. On Thursday, Oct. 23, founder Jeff Bezos told customers that his "search inside the book" service would allow them to type a name or phrase--and be immediately rewarded with a report of instances of those words appearing in the pages of one of 120,000 tomes. Then, with a single click, Amazon would deliver an image of the very page in question.

"The program is 100 percent focused on selling more books," says Amazon VP Steve Kessel. But for anyone who's ever done even casual research work, Amazon's scheme is much more than a sales device: it's a lightning bolt from the future. Some people literally broke out in tears as they punched in queries and unearthed obscure but relevant citations. Others discovered previously unknown nuggets that led them actually to buy the book. (Amazon claimed that in the first week, the sales rate for those books included in the program was 9 percent higher than for those whose contents were not online.)

Yes, there were limitations. Amazon has scanned "only" 120,000 books (it promises many more) and only registered Amazon customers can use it. Users can view just two pages on either side of the citation and can't print the results (this to protect copyright). But clearly we are now on the threshold of a system by which all books are scanned--eventually including even hard-to-find, out-of-print volumes--with their contents instantly accessible. Thousands of library rats suddenly understood that forays that had once taken months to complete could now be dispatched in an evening. And many more projects that were previously unfeasible had suddenly been transformed to no-brainers.

"Search inside the book" is part of a revolution made possible by the digitalization of, well, everything. By basing information on a binary lingua franca, it's now possible to sift through masses of data to find just what you need. Because the World Wide Web can be treated as a vast digital archive, the upstart company Google (now reportedly considering an IPO that could value its worth at as much as $25 billion) could develop advanced algorithms to extract even the most obscure needles out of the cyber-haystack. "We want to bring all information online, not just what's in commercial transactions," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who praises the Amazon program as "an important part of the evolution of the Internet."

The next step in this revolution is to rope in the kinds of information that were previously thought of as unarchivable--and make that stuff searchable, too. Just last week a paper by Berkeley scientists estimated that information created on print, film, tape and disk in 2002 was roughly equivalent to all the text in the Library of Congress--multiplied by 500,000. The amount has doubled in the past three years and will grow even faster as people begin to take advantage of low-cost storage technology to routinely keep all their mail and documents, record all their conversations and visually capture whatever's in their field of vision. Google and now Amazon (which has started a separate search-technology company) are teaching us that with cheap storage, powerful computers and smart software, we can store everything online and then search the heck out of it to find what's important to us, as well as make connections that never would have been previously possible.

What we call history began when humans started to record their experiences on cave walls, in cuneiform and on papyrus. The ability to record events was a transforming development for our entire species. But until very recently--until the Web--the vast collective documentary created by human beings has always been limited because the works we created were so difficult to access. Very little was stored, much was lost and much of what existed was hard to find. All but the tiniest portion of the vast human experience has been scattered to the winds.

That's why the advances of Google and Amazon are so profoundly important. They are harbingers of a new kind of history, where the world's information is not only more plentiful and diverse, but astonishingly accessible. There are obstacles: copyright entanglements, privacy concerns and a way to pay for it. But on Oct. 23, 2003, a lot of people realized that History 2.0 is well underway. May civilization live long enough to explore its implications.