The device promised by the dotcom age, which we’d use for everything from watching TV, reading books and making phone calls to browsing the web, working and playing games is now a clich√©, both technology vendors and consumers now realising we want different experiences from different tools.

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).