I have seen the inside of Google—the very symbol of technological omnipotence—and it looks like a cross between an Orwellian preschool and the Death Star.
I know, I know. Hard to believe. I was expecting something different. A little … fluffier, perhaps. Turns out, all of Google’s “cloud” technology doesn’t reside in clouds at all, but in massive buildings where, for all I know, the Ark of the Covenant might be squirrelled away.
Take a look, for instance, at this floor of servers to your left. Now, I’m not exactly sure how computers actually work, particularly computers of this magnitude. I’m just happy they do. But I’m assuming that, if you pried the top off of one of these things, you’d find all sorts of information in there—as if it was an overfilled computerized basement or something. Maybe you’d find a link to a Wikipedia article on screech owls, or a conduit to a splashpage for In-N-Out burgers, or maybe even a movie review from Plugged In (maybe Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure?!). Over there wedged in the corner, you might find a record of a Google search you conducted on Mississippi cruises four months ago or a copy of that picture you downloaded sometime in January. Google’s massive servers are a little like elephants, you know: They never forget.
And then, below, you see an almost comical network of pipes that, to me, would feel more at home in a gigantic game of Mouse Trap than a gigantic worldwide corporation. Can’t you imagine dozens of hyped-up kindergarteners running around this room, playing hide-and-seek and swinging from the pipes like rhesus monkeys? (Assuming the floor is softer and spongier than it looks, of course.)
According to Google’s caption, these pipes are part of the cooling system in their center in The Dalles, Ore. And that makes sense: Thousands of servers would require a pretty sophisticated cooling system, no matter the color of the pipes. But I kinda prefer to imagine these more as conduits for data: Our Google searches (say, “why is a raven like a writing desk?”) zip through one set of pipes (like those old tubes you’d use in a bank drive-through) and the answers come whizzing back through another. Isn’t that a lot more emotionally satisfying than to think of all this data just whizzing around our heads and worming its way into our Wi-Fi network? Let’s keep all those searches out of my swiftly diminishing hair, shall we?
Google’s pictures (you can find ’em all here) are fascinating, kinda pretty and maybe a little frightening. For one thing, it reinforces just how big Google is and how much it might potentially know about you. But also, I can picture an alien or psychopath stalking some of those badly lit hallways.
But it also reminds me that, even in this increasingly paperless, largely digital age in which we live, there’s still physical substance—massive substance—behind it. Typing in a 
Google search would’ve seemed like magic a couple of decades ago (and, as you can tell by my descriptions, still feels a little magical to me). But these pictures remind us that our global catalog of knowledge and information is still housed in warehouses of a sort—where bits and bytes of Dante’s Inferno might rest next to some pixels of a LOLcat, and where pictures of the Ark of the Covenant might be hidden away—down a virtual hallway, which in turn is found down a real one—waiting to be discovered.
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