But the decline of newsprint trumpeted by everyone from reporters to media barons has another potential victim — the software companies like Quark and Adobe who’ve spent the past 30 years investing billions in desktop publishing, graphic design and publications management applications.

The real magic of the movies happens inside the powerful computers of digital effects houses today — where the weather, interfering studio suits and the limitations of real-world physics can’t hold up the shoot or ruin million dollar sets.

The first half of the book is more or less an ad for the company, where Tancer explains his predictions about when people will search for a given thing or his detective work to understand seemingly aberrant search phenomena (like searches for prom dresses months before the traditional US prom season).