Search Engines

Posted on December 6, 2007
Filed Under Fake Culture, Journal |

Has anyone else noticed that with the larger and more popular Search Engines, you really have to dig deep to get anything worth while?

Most of the results are either commercial or retail information, trying to sell something. Or else they are from major media outlets such as BBC, Fox, NYTimes and even Wikipedia! I have found it increasingly difficult to find impartial and unbiased information. I stopped watching TV for this exact same reason - and it appears that slowly the Internet is falling down the same hole.

Yet there are so many websites out there with so much wonderful information, but most of the time they are discovered by chance, or shared via word-of-mouth through blogs and forums. It is coming close to the point of having to manually trawl vast amounts of search results and websites before finding relevant information.

Of course, the search engines work reasonably fine when you enter specific terms, but on many occasions the entire reason of my search is to find specific information and I therefore only have general terms to enter into the search box. Do you have this same problem?

In the future I suspect the Internet will become increasingly polarized. It will divide itself between the mainstream needs becoming a simple extension to the TV, whilst at the same time forming an increasingly harder-to-discover “underground” catering to niches of information for those that truly want to learn about our world.

On the one hand everything will be packaged as entertainment (remember the days when entertainment was a luxury rather than the focus of life?), all other information will fall between the cracks of that rigid structure. And that’s already starting to happen.

Perhaps a new type of search engine is in order? One which can go searching for specific information based upon general terms - without returning results based upon mass-consensus. Search for economic problems and you would never know that both the US, the EU and most of the world are suffering the worst economic crisis for decades. Look for Internet Control Measures and there is absolutely no sign that US corporations are trying to deregulate the Internet. Of course if you look for Internet Deregulation you get a bit closer to the truth - but even that requires further refinement of your search terms.

Maybe there are other ways to locate information, perhaps you do something very different to me?

Meanwhile here’s an interesting video on how a certain search engine is expanding into real world data (biology, genetic data, etc)