Google once introduced a search mode that did not stop at answering a question. It sent you to the time and place where the answer was still walking around.
The pitch was simple: time-travel search lets Google carry you across time and space to the moment and location you most want to reach, so you can experience what you want to know instead of reading someone else's summary. The examples made the promise sound wonderfully unreasonable.
Want Xi Shi's weight-loss secret? No ordinary search engine on Earth can give you a reliable answer. Time-travel search could put you in the late Spring and Autumn period, face to face with the famous beauty, and you could ask her directly.
Want to know whether the legend of a rider raising dust while the imperial concubine smiled is true? Jump to the Tang dynasty, take a night tour of Daming Palace, and watch the legendary Rainbow Skirt and Feathered Dress dance with your own eyes.
Want to see whether Dream of the Red Chamber was really Cao Xueqin's own life? Sit down with the author who read for ten years and revised five times, drink tea, talk about life, and you might become the first modern person to meet the real-life prototype of Lin Daiyu.
Want to test a science fiction novel? Look four hundred years ahead and see whether visitors from the three-star system of Centaurus really reach Earth. If you experience how cosmic law shapes interstellar exchange, you might become a key figure in changing the history of Earth, or the universe.
If that sounded like your kind of trip, the search box was waiting. Type in the question you care about, hit search, and the door to another time would open.
How the imaginary physics worked
According to the explanation, time-travel search used the search engine's built-in gravitational-field distortion. On top of keyword hyperspace penetration technology, it decomposed the searcher's entire electromagnetic signature, downshifted the frequency, sent it to the target spacetime, and reassembled and matched it there. The result was thought-level travel across time and space, plus information retrieval from the target era. This was presented as a new generation of search technology.
Then came the secret. To index web pages produced at different times and places and still deliver accurate, fast results, every modern search engine on Earth already had cross-time capability. Search experts had supposedly kept this from the public out of kindness, to avoid excessive public attention.
Of course, a search engine having cross-time ability did not mean it could transport the searcher. That required Google's newly developed gravitational-field neural-network replacement technology, licensed under Mars patent 900916. The system decomposed all the electromagnetic features that make up human perception and thought, transmitted them without loss through a distorted gravitational-field horizon, and reassembled them.
Put simply, time-travel search built a 100 percent identical thought-clone mirror at the other end of spacetime and kept a real-time information link open across time and space.
The fine print
Before using time-travel search, you were told to inform a friend nearby. If you got lost in spacetime, that friend could use the kick method to bring your mind fully back to the real world.
Do not carry cameras, phones, tablets with cameras, or any other recording device. Any cross-time exposure or imaging could change the direction of the traveler's thought pulses and leave unexpected results in memory.
Do not bring cosmetics, sunscreen, toothpaste, shampoo, shower gel, or other gels or liquids over 100 ml. If you could not throw away the excess before departure, Google offered a time-travel checked baggage service.
Searching for Xiao Shi
And then there was the user who tried to search for Xiao Shi. The interface went into full internet-rant mode. You want to search Xiao Shi? You really want to time-travel and search Xiao Shi? A time-travel engine has a hard life. Type a few characters and expect an accurate jump? Do you think a computer is a fortune-telling god working for free? Aren't you afraid of cross-time paranormal incidents? Someone had already traveled and failed to find Xiao Shi, and now they were searching again. Which universe did they want to search? Was there nothing on Earth that would do? Four-dimensional spacetime is bigger than an elephant. Where exactly was Xiao Shi supposed to be?
Eventually the page gave in: fine, since you are so excited, one trip. It generated a travel code:
搜索“小十” - 穿越码生成 - 甲寅庚午己酉壬申庚辰丙辰庚寅庚辰 - 引力场扭曲中
The result came with a preparation-to-travel button. What happened after that was left to the traveler's own time. The only instruction was to go to g.cn, enter Google search, and click the Google Time Travel link at the bottom.