Information overload

The world wide web started with hardly any useful information for the likes of an average internet user of today. It started simply as a way of communicating conveniently among the universities and science labs. See the history of WWW on Wikipedia here -> WWW .

When all types of industries, institutions and geeks started uploading information on the WWW - publishing and sharing, then came the likes of search engines Lycos/AltaVista that became popular. See the history of search engines on Wikipedia here -> Search engines .

Then came Google - which completely changed the way people browsed the internet. Instead of typing an address in the URL bar of the internet browser, they started with Google always. A lot many percentage of people still do the same.

But with the amount of information that can be browsed on the WWW these days, google search results are also overwhelming. So much so that it is becoming impossible to conclude reading on a topic, you never know how much is enough.

You search for a news piece and find millions of hits!

How do you know that which ones are worth reading, or good! Good articles are now at the mercy of the Google page rank algorithm.

Imagine the amount of difficulty a new portal will have - aggressive marketing, and ads everywhere like on TV/radio is probably the only way of boosting initial number of visitors. Even if a portal has excellent articles, tremendous value - unless millions of people hit it, it will not feature in the initial pages of Google search results. And the problem is even more glaring is the portal deals with generic topics.

Probably the next step in search is a question-answering kind of system, that can search within the Google search results to pull out useful results. And they will introduce their own ranking algorithms...

With so much information on the WWW these days - if you are a student or an upcoming professional - you are clueless about how much information is enough, and you can never be sure that you did not miss out on some valuable information. It is just impractical to find the best category by browsing through search engines.

It is tiring, it is endless.

These days I find Wikipedia as the best source of information to know about anything, and have stopped browsing through Google now. I search on Wikipedia, browse known and trusted news portals like Nytimes/BBC/CNN/Timesofindia/Hindu, and be done with it for most of my reading on the internet.

I know there are millions of web pages sitting out there with valuable information about so many things I would benefit from. But have to live with the incompleteness.

May be soon Google will not be the starting point of net browsing any more, people will go back to typing the URL address on the internet browser :)

Unless..... somebody comes up with search templates, where you can fill values based on which you want to search - and generic fields which google/yahoo/bing all understand and give you results accordingly. Then the ranking algorithm is yours - the user's. And there can be default set of values for users who don't care either way.

Or

Unless.....somebody comes up with the big daddy of Google using some magic... :)

Until then... so long ...