My late research about categories, tags, and social networking has led me to the unsatisfactory conclusion that, with the information overflow we are facing, the online experience of many web users has been reduced to following the latest buzz.
While there is nothing wrong in being informed of the recent developments in world news or in your field of choice, I believe this rat race can be misleading. My last post about the originality of one’s idea supports this statement: if there is much to be learned from the past information, fostering creativity by refactoring, how are we improving ourselves by only focusing on the present?
This issue is amplified by the use of Google, since the latter has announced a revision of its algorithm in order to privilege the most recent content. This radical change in the search engine’s philosophy will decrease the ranking of relevant but seldom updated sites. Google is perfectly entitled to modify their algorithm, but then who will then take care of retrieving older information? Admittedly, Google is not the only search engine, but it is, unfortunately, the most used, and people have a hard time adopting (and adapting to) new applications. Technorati, a popular blog search engine, is also very efficient in retrieving fresh content, but almost useless to fetch relevant older content. However, Technorati was designed with this purpose in mind, so they are not altering their service in any way.
It would be nice to remember that search engines are not the only way to retrieve data from the web, as much as it would be interesting to remember why we spend anytime online. If you are looking for information, for example, there was a time when heading to a library was the normality. Today, virtual repositories of knowledge such as Wikipedia exist online. How many of you go to Wikipedia as their first entry point for a web search? Do you ever use another alternative than the mighty search engines? Let us not dismiss the past so easily, let us continue the use of encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Information is power indeed, but fresh information is only but a tree in the forest of knowledge. And we all know how easy it can be to not see the forest for the trees.
Further reading:
- Search Engine Watch: Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks