Will Internet search eventually fail from overload?
At PCMag, John Dvorak’s stock-in-trade is writing provocative columns. Sometimes he just seems to be trying to stir up things but other times he is on target. His recent column raises an important issue. Is Internet search turning up less and less reliable information and is it doomed to be overloaded by the information explosion? Dvorak begins:
Since the first Web crawlers appeared, it was obvious that the usefulness of the Internet would fully depend on whether you could actually find things there. We have enough trouble finding things on our own hard disks, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes for a memo. With the Internet, we’re sifting through mountains of data scattered throughout the world.
Unfortunately, it’s still not so easy to find what we need. It seems as if a reorganization of some kind would solve the problem, but one is not forthcoming.
What we need is a Dewey Decimal or LOC categorization methodology for the Net, and sometime soon. I only say this because at some point, no matter what Google and the other search companies think, the amount of information will overload their ability to search for it. And I do not mean in a small way.
He concludes:
As the mountains of useless details, spam, and redundant data grow and grow, it’s apparent that it will all blow up and we’ll have access to less, not more real information.
In short, we are witnessing the Tower of Babel phenomenon right before our eyes. And note that the Tower of Babel story did not turn out all that well for the participants.
A related problem is that so many people regard search engine results as the final word and ignore the fact that search results are not vetted for accuracy but are simply the result of some algorithm. Also, it always surprises me that so many people do not seem to know how to create a decent search query.
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