I do wish they had stayed true to The Book with the entry for Earth. 
But IMO The Book is the closest thing to Google imagined that I’ve ever read.
But you forget, there is the matter of subspace transmissions. That’s the binary to Wi Fi, or there is also a newly coined phrase for satelite wireless space. Soft Space or something like that. I think subspace transmissions played an imortant part in the Third Star Trek Franchise.
Clarification: “The Book on a smartphone…”
You know, folks, most of the answers given thus far have been the opposite of what the OP asked for. Yes, there have been many stories featuring a computer with a vast database of facts. Yes, there have been stories where average citizens have terminals in their own home to access the information. But most of them anticipated this as a single entity. I’m not seeing examples where the information is distributed across many different sites run by many different people. Even “the tank” linked to other tanks, I get the impression that there’s a central organisation running them all.
The other thing is that in most (if not all) of these stories the central database contains data which is extracted. The general public aren’t able to directly input data - and, more significantly, incorrect data - thus diluting the value of the data being drawn out. One wonders how well Joe would have fared with a pool of data that included Conservapedia, for example.
Earth, by David Brin.
The characters routinely post and/or retreive data on the ‘World Data Net’ to which they connect on desktops, laptops, data plaques and what have you. None of the data is centralized…when one point is blocked there are others to which you can get to and so forth.
He also anticipates:
- People micro-sourcing themselves. That is they only view news and information that agrees with their preconceived notions and reinforces their opinions.
- People having places to go to post wild theories that might not stand up to professional scrutiny but they believe are worth sharing.
- Collaboration through the net to solve problems.
- Online mourning for the death of others known only online.
Heck, at one point there’s even a point where a character gets mad and smacks a machine for taking 7 seconds to search out some data.
I remember an Arthur C. Clarke story, possibly one of the sequels to 2001, which included kids in a competition to see who could find information most efficiently on a computer network. Will try to locate it later, but has anyone organized such a competition IRL?
It’s not exactly Google, but any discussion of the Internet in SF has to recognize, in addition to Arthur C. Clarke’s various suggestions and Murray Leinster’s A Logic Named Joe (both alluded to above), H.G. wells’ 1930s idea of the World Brain/World Encyclopedia, which would allow
Wells envisioned the use of microfilms and other recordings to present such direct experience. He hadn’t visualized a direct electronic connection. Nor an intelligent search function. But he did imagine organized and indexed knowledge, which is as close to a search engine as you’re going to get without any sort of computing device.wells published his ideas in a number of places in the 1930s, chiefly in his book The World Brain.
Claiming that David Brin made any terrifically prescient predictions in Earth is kind of pushing it:
He wrote it in 1988 and 1989 and it was published in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee was working on the idea of the World Wide Web right then. Berners-Lee was living in Switzerland and Brin was living in France at the time (while his wife did her post-doc at the Sorbonne). It’s possible that the two of them knew each other.
In one of Jack Vance’s books the people of one planet all carry around a device that does Google like things for them. They can use the device (if memory serves) to talk to other people and to find any information they want. He was picturing a single giant central computer I think, the interface was all voice and he didn’t mention any pornographic uses but it seems Google-like to me. I picture cell phones with internet access to be moving toward this device. Guess I’m going to have to reread all my Vance to find it.
Closest approach, I think, would be The Machine Stops written by Forster in 1909. It highlights the isolation and major social changes ushered in by something akin to the internet, and the discussion/rehashing of banal ideas with little original thought.
It’s amazing! In post #4, gaffa successfully predicted that in post #31 Machine Elf would mention the novel The Machine Stops.
As mentioned above, Leinster’s a Logic Named Joe. In the story, such a “data tank” 9or whatever he called it) malfunctioned and its “censorship circuits” didn’t work. The fact that they were thought necessary is what I find interesting. Without them, kids are depicted downloading porn. People post information about how to break into banks or how to murder your wife – just the sorts of things moralists have complained about our on-censored Internet doing. at the end, the errant unit responsible is taken off-line and fixed, and life goes back to normal.
Leinster had a great story here, inspired, as others have said, by Vannevar Bush’s speculations, although things like the downloading of porn were Leinster’s extrapolation.
Unfortunately, neither he nor anyone else followed up this promising line of speculation, even though there were lots of potential stories to be spun out of it. (Do we really need censorship? After people get a taste of unbridled information access, won’t they try to restore it? What about the potential for Crime and Fraud through the system, and disinformation? And so on.)
by the time Clarke was writing, ARPANET was a reality, and it was definitely established wyhen writers like Brin were working. What amazes me is how long it’s taken for the Internet to become a regular fixture in SF stories, when SF writers are reputed to be such visionaries. It’s only in recent years that I’ve seen it show up in Harry Turtledove’s World War series (Aliens have The Internet, too!), John Scalzi’s future war series, and the like.
:dubious:
They are sorta populous and not all that small countries…
Well, but the OP isn’t exactly clear. It mentions “distributed” but also asks for a comparison to Google, even though Google is not distributed nor run by many different people.
All of this stuff was more or less in place on Usenet before Brin wrote (or at least published) EARTH. (1) somewhat less so, but you could already see it in the way newsgroups were evolving.
For that matter, the Internet itself, absent only the WWW, was very much a going concern - FTP, Usenet, and email were all things that Brin almost certain was familiar with. In fact, he probably used them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d used Gophernet as well.
Further - although the Internet proper lacked much in the way of user-friendly interfaces (with the exception of Gophernet), there were plenty of walled-garden online services (Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc).
Mash all these things together, and it’d be hard for an SF writer in the late 80s not to anticipate something that looks very much like the Internet we have today.
Don’t know Brin’s particular history, but a lot of SF writers were active on GEnie back in the 80s.
It’s in “The Fountains of Paradise” (if you can use Amazon or some other search engine to look inside the book you’ll find the passage you want by looking for the word “rainfall”)
That’s why, as soon as I can get this dadburn Flummox Capacitor properly installed, I’m publishing my nearly-finished Time Travel Novel in 1767.