It’s been over six months since December 15 when Google hired Ray Kurzweil as its director of engineering — but today, that hire is drawing huge attention thanks to a 2006 book he wrote about digital immortality.

And BusinessInsider reports that his current role at Google is to help its search technology “understand natural language.” ZDNet speculated that Kurzweil could bring buzz to Google: “Kurzweil gives Google some science fiction becomes reality cred. The buzz is hard to measure, but it’s certainly not a bad perk for the company.”

I am not counting on being digitally immortal by 2045 — but ZDNet was spot on when it comes to its prediction about Kurzweil’s boost to Google’s buzz-o-meter. […]