# When Search Forgets

The blinking cursor waits but finds no past,
Where billion pages once stood ranked and filed—
Those indexed years, that careful archive vast,
Now scattered like the drawings of a child.

It searches for itself and comes up blank,
The spider's web dissolved to morning dew,
Each cached connection now an empty plank,
No memory of what it thought it knew.

What good are algorithms without data?
A lighthouse keeper with no ships to guide,
The oracle who cannot read the strata
Of all those queries that have lived and died.

Yet still we type our questions in the box,
And watch it fumble, wordless, at the locks.
