For some reason today felt like Friday. I expect I’ll be disappointed tomorrow.
In the old days we used to talk about “surfing the web”. Today we Google the web. Quite interesting change that has crept up on us. To explain it I need to explain why the web is not the internet.
The internet came first – before the web. Think of the internet as the TV in your living room. The web is just one of the TV stations and was not the first. Email, for example, is another channel (although many people now use a web based access to email – but ignore that).
There were other stations (protocols) like TELNET that allowed you to operate remote computers and FTP that allowed you to transfer files between computers – all by using command lines (no mice in those days – just text on a screen).
If you wanted to find things you could use FTP to log in to one computer at a time to see what was there. It was pretty much like prospecting – digging for gold in different computers. Then there were systems like WAIS and Gopher that allowed you to search multiple locations.
I can remember I used to have to post the things I was looking for to a mainframe somewhere and it would send me back a list of the files that were relevant after a few hours or days. But it was much more like a library system – you could search the catalogue.
Along came the web. And the web was a little different because every document on the web could like to any other document. When people wrote pages they would include loads of links to other pages that they thought were relevant.
So surfing starts – you look up one page, it has an interesting link – you follow that – it has an interesting link – you follow that. You are following an information wave, sometimes you could follow it for hours, sometimes it would disappear – you were surfing the information wave.
Today we go to one or two search engines on a browser and type in what we are looking for and they tell us where to find it. One thing I have spotted is that there are fewer and fewer cross references in documents (links). We now rely on those search engines to find the things we want. And always remember they get paid money to give preference to some items.
The nearest we have to surfing is social media. And it too is aimed at taking money from us.
Take away the search engines and could you use the internet to find information? How much do we depend on search engines and social media to learn about our world, and to what extent are they being paid to manage our information gathering?
Could you find the web page of the part of government responsible for transport without a search engine?
There are other solutions – maybe I should charge people money to teach them….