I just finished "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and there is a discussion about this in there. Turns out its very hard to get from "what you like" to "what I want to buy." Google actually has an advantage here, in that it is easier to identify search phrases that are part of the pre-buying process.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's even harder to get to "machines are taking over" from "here's a bunch of networked processors". :-D

Thanks for the book recommendation - I'll have to read that!