Propriety, Netiquette, and Responsible Computing

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by glatt

I remember in the mid 90's the local tv news was reporting on the evils of widespread porn on the internet. This was before Google, when search results were not as good. They were interviewing this little old lady. Picture her with her wavering old lady voice, saying "All I wanted was a recipe for hot crossed buns..."

Yeah, right.

I did a Google search for hot crossed buns, and the first screen, anyhow, had only recipes and the lyrics for a nursery school by the same name.

[glatt]

Do you remember search engines before Google? Alta Vista would give you results, but they weren't very good.

[SamIam]

Yeah, like Dog Pile or Lycos and such. They weren't as good as Google now is, but none of them ever pointed me to a porn site, either. I don't know. I am completely uninterested in porn (the real thing is MUCH more fun ). And in my experience if I leave porn alone, it leaves me alone.

[glatt]

Or maybe when you saw that they pointed you to pron, you just didn't click on it. Back then the person doing the searching was more important than the search engine. You had to actually think about how you were searching.

[SamIam]

True enough.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by glatt

Or maybe when you saw that they pointed you to pron, you just didn't click on it. Back then the person doing the searching was more important than the search engine. You had to actually think about how you were searching.

I miss that.

Search engines now, and google in particular, are so intelligent. You can throw in a mispelt, half-remembered something and somehow, much of the time, it interprets and presents you with the very thing you were looking for, alng with a bunch of stuff you didn't know you needed to know...

But a part of me misses those evenings spent trawling through my favourite search engines, looking for info on this show, or that actor. Skipping about between the different engines and meta engines, getting different results from each of them. Having to think creatively about your search terms to stand a chance of cutting through the mass of sites.

I still get to do that in some ways, thanks to the far less intelligent and intuitive search engines favoured by academic and archival sites and gateways. *blinks* the technology is there guys. There's no fucking excuse now.

But it isn't the same buzz as a crawl through the internet, treasure hunting and going off on side steps, following odd paths and finding strange places, guided by the most rudimentary maps.

Now I get to see so much more of what's there, and can explore far more widely than before, but I am doing it with sat nav. Way more efficient, and in many ways more fun, but sometimes I miss the old ways :p

[JBKlyde]

Google's motto for it's employee's is "don't be evil".. Evil in definition is "unclean".. I take at least 2 showers a day..