There's something very wrong about the direction that is being taken by the Internet. The days of its infancy are long past. It is a massive, significant daily reality for millions of people. For many of us it is our major source of information. But does it deliver information efficiently and pleasantly, in a user-friendly way? It does not!
Oh, yes, the search engines do an impressive job in their way. But considering the importance that their task has now assumed (in view of the fact that they are our only way of sorting through the petabits of data out there), their performance is sadly lacking. The energies of the companies that own them are focussed on the "search engine wars," the fight for market share and the ongoing takeover battle as search engines eat one another like Jurassic dinosaurs. Most of them rely on other search engines for the results they serve up, so no matter which one you use, the same sites appear, the same illogical inclusions and omissions occur. The free market "should" provide a number of competing services, each one of which offers its own product in its own way. That's not happening.
For instance. Search the web for "Natomah," the Siberian Husky racing kennel of Art and Judy Allen in the 1950s and 1960s. All you get is pedigrees containing that name, plus the Seppala News database which is devoid of any informational content for Natomah, though there's a page with the heading "Natomah Kennel." Anyone who wants actual information about Natomah Kennels will "search the web" in vain. Meanwhile, there is a page of basic information about Natomah Kennels and its bloodline available on my website at
http://www.seppalasleddogs.com/natomah.htm
It has been there for three weeks, along with twelve other similar pages offering basic information about other historic Siberian Husky bloodlines. None of these pages turn up in Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista, ExactSeek or other web search results. Three weeks is an eternity on the web… what's wrong with the search engines? My website's control software informs me that in the past three days the site has been visited by six different search engine bots, including Google and Inktomi, but whatever they are doing, they aren't indexing my site.
Oh, yes, I know. I can PAY to have these pages included in search engine results. I'm already offering free information that neither the Siberian Husky Club of America nor its thousands of greedy breeders, some of whom (to judge by the pedigrees turned up by the search engines) are using these very bloodlines described by my web pages, can be bothered to research and put online. I can pay a search engine to publicise the free information I'm offering. No thanks.
Add in ebay offering you an opportunity to buy and sell "natomah" online, the massive frustration of slow servers (it's still the "WorldWide Wait"), viruses, popups and all the other annoyances that we suffer in our daily quest for online information… and you wonder why we bother. And with that, I'm going out to enjoy the brisk autumn air and continue brushing out trails.
Posted by jjeffrey at September 5, 2003 12:49 PM