New York:
Remember those lines? Back when commissars commanded the Soviet Union's economy like Knute commanding the tides, people would wait for hours in long queues for free bread. Although the bread was free, people paid for it with their time.
To economists, the long lines were a real-life example of the market requirement that payment be made one way or another -- in money or in time. (In this country, the long lines would be for an Apple gadget, which is neither cheap nor scarce. But explaining that mystery is for another time.)
Paying with time rather than money seems just as common on the Web. I jump through a number of hoops nearly every day to find my favorite television shows online, having cut my cable and TiVo DVR service to save about $110 a month. So to avoid paying about $3.60 a day, I instead spend 5 to 10 minutes searching for shows on Hulu.com or Clicker.com.
Is it worth it? I don't know. I couldn't find an economist who could tell me exactly how my leisure time should be valued. (I did, however, find an oddly fascinating government document that tried to assess the value of travel time by looking at the wage rates of truck drivers and airline pilots.)
I don't spend my leisure time merely searching online for TV sitcoms. I do the same thing for news, and so do millions of other people, as evidenced by the shrinking of the audience for television news programs and of the paid readership of newspapers and magazines. We all seem to prefer to spend time ferreting out news of Lindsay Lohan's fingernails or sorting out the best report of an earthquake in Palm Springs than to pay someone a pittance to do it for us. The same goes for finding discount coupons or a cheaper air fare. A not-insignificant amount of time can be spent on such searches -- hours each week, undoubtedly.
Of course, as a lifelong newsman, I'm tempted to argue that people will eventually realize the error of their ways, make the calculation of the value of their time and start paying for their videos and their news. After all, a fair number of people began paying less than a dollar for the convenience of downloading a song from iTunes or Amazon.com, rather than wasting time hunting for a playable pirated version.
But I think that something else will happen. Technology could very well make the Soviet bread line disappear. Do you remember how long it took to do a Google search a dozen years ago, when the service started? Probably not, but Google engineers calculate that their refinements have saved users a billion seconds a day. Using Google to quickly make the calculation, that comes out to about 1,800 lifetimes.
The company is obsessed with time. Some employees can be seen on their Mountain View, Calif., campus wearing T-shirts bearing the words "Web Nothing Me." It's a promotion of the company's soon-to-be-released Chrome operating system, which the company says will boot a computer and its browser in seven seconds or less -- in other words, "there's nothing between me and the Web."
Google makes it easier to get search results by suggesting possible search terms as a query is typed. (Engineers there, who must measure just about everything, had noticed that query lengths were becoming longer as we turned into a nation of research librarians.) Typing some queries gives you the results right on the top of the search page. Type in "poison center," for instance, and you get the toll-free phone number for poison emergencies.
Type in a few letters of some queries, like "walm," for example, and the suggestion box will take you directly to Wal-Mart's site, bypassing the results page.
Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who studies information retrieval as part of the team responsible for Google's search algorithms, says the technology hasn't come far enough that we can get exactly what we want in milliseconds. "It's still baby steps," he says, though one can glimpse the future in the personalized results of Google News. It learns from the news articles you've previously selected to anticipate the articles and news sources you probably want.
"There are instances of serendipity," he says. "Sometimes I find things I would not have read."
As search becomes faster and smarter, it's as if the Internet becomes a high-speed moving sidewalk whisking everyone to free loaves of bread. Paying for the search becomes irrelevant as the time spent searching becomes trivial.
Mr. Singhal says he thinks it will get even better. "What we are optimizing," he says, "is that you can have your bread and your cheese and soup and dessert all at the same time, and we put it on the table."
It could be a nice buffet, comrades, if not exactly fine dining.