Way back in January, when my site had only been up for a few days, I noticed something odd in my daily usage logs. Something called a "Googlebot" had crawled my site. Somehow, through all the chaos and pablum of the internet, it had found my infant site—barely cleansed of its amniotic fluid, in fact—and indexed it. This was kind of cool because it meant that my site would show up in Google searches when you typed in "Karen Vaughn solitude" or "Nudist Colony of the Dead" or just "Terrible Movies." Huzzah for that, right? But the image that kept insinuating itself on my brain was that of a tiny, heinously creepy insect creature, brushing its sticky little legs and feelers on every page of my site. I couldn't help it. The Googlebots creeped me out.

How did the Googlebot find my site? It was still a wallflower then, clinging self-consciously to its glass of punch while everyone else danced. No one had linked to me yet. No one but my family and Nick even knew it was there. And yet somehow, this odd, roving, not-quite entity had discovered my hiding place and forced me out on the dance floor, alongside the cool kids with the feathered hair. It was disconcerting. A neon sign reading "Big Brother" was illuminated in my head.

I think it's partly the name. Googlebot. It sounds too much like nanobots, those freaky little futuristic mechanisms that are supposed to crawl around through your insides and attack cancer or syphilis on a molecular level. Now, I'm fully prepared to accept these medical marvels, although I don't relish the idea of robot armies re-enacting the Battle of Hastings in my liver. My real is that they would go all Skynet and turn against the people they were meant to help. Maybe they'd start demanding "protection money," and if you didn't pay up in a timely manner, they'd convert all your white blood cells into refried beans or something. Maybe that's what I'm afraid will happen with the Googlebots. Sounds implausible? Well, so did the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine when it was first invented by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 1500s.

Googlebots also call to mind that terrible 80s film (not a Great Terrible Film, just a terrible film) with Tom Selleck in it. I think it was called "Runaway," and there were these robot spider assassins that scuttled all over the place and attacked Gene Simmons from KISS. They almost got Tom Selleck, too, but his mojo saved him. Are these really the sorts of things we want prowling around our sites, indexing us and making us join the collective against our will? Is resistance, in fact, futile? Maybe I should launch an investigation into the nefarious Googlebot Illuminati, which no doubt control every aspect of this fractured world we live in.

Or maybe I should just lay off the Neal Stephenson for awhile.

Tags: scared