Rabbit hole

“ The Past, Present, and Future of Search
"Search has become the most hotly contested field in the world of technology." [4]
Remember Northern Light? How about Excite, Galaxy, Lycos, HotBot, Magellan, InfoSpace, Go, Webcrawler, iWon, Netfind, or Webtop? If so, you've been searching the Internet a long time because many of these search engines are long gone and forgotten. However many changes in search and search engines have taken place in recent years, nothing has been quite so dramatic as what has occurred in the past two years with the appearance of the new Yahoo and Live Search engines. ”

“ I have discussed the extent to which the logic of enclosure works for the commons of the mind as well as it did for the arable commons, taking into account the effects of an information society and a global Internet. What I have not done is asked whether a global network actually transforms some of our assumptions about how creation happens in a way that reshapes the debate about the need for incentives, at least in certain areas. ”

“ In a speech, Fillmore quoted a key passage: “The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails covered by the brain.” [4.25] Bush might as well have been describing the World Wide Web and its links that allow you to click on “Boeing” and see “Airplanes” or click on “Clinton” and see “Presidents.” Ted Nelson, a dreamer-writer-programmer, was thinking of the memex when he invented hypertext links. ”

“ Even if Google did not undertake the task of digitization, there would be hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others who would—not with Google's resources, to be sure. In the process, they would create something quite remarkable. 38
The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. ”

“ It isn't necessarily the conversation—hackers often talk about common board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip. Underground boards can best be distinguished by their files, or "philes," pre-composed texts which teach the techniques and ethos of the underground. These are prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. Some are anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the "hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if he has one. ”

“ They began to study new models of interconnectivity and group mind, such as James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Rupert Sheldrakes theory of morphogenesis, to explain and confirm their growing sense of non-local community. By the mid 1990s many internet users began to see the entire planet as a single organism, with human beings as the neurons in a global brain. The internet, according to this scheme, was the neural network being used to wire up this brain so that it could function in a coordinated fashion. ”

“ Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. ”

“ Students being taught the dynamics of Wikipedia articles would take them into the world of critical thinking, reading, and deep research skills, because the hyperlinks that lead to different information would equip their flexibility in online navigation, intensify their literature search skills, as well as improve their source evaluation. ”

“ What about finding information on the internet? "The internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the internet. When one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. ”

“ The World Wide Web, whose rather opaque platform ascended primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically primitive functions. ”

“ Material posted to the Internet typically serves a time-limited purpose and targets a distinct network of users, while its library held counterpart will document the site for a wide variety of patrons over time. A scholar perusing a collection of archived web pages on the Free Tibet movement, or examining the evolution of educational information on a communicable disease, seeks and encounters that material for a very different purpose than the creators originally intended. ”

“ We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic. All the while, no doubt in part due to links to our articles from Google, an increasing number of other websites link to Wikipedia, increasing the standing of Wikipedia pages in Google results. ”

“ Better to have a well-managed system in which official approval is required to put up a site, where only a few selected actions are permitted by the network protocols, where most of us are merely recipients of information, where spam, viruses, and piracy (and innovation and participatory culture and anonymous speech) are impossible. ”

“ How do we process, calibrate, reorganize, analyze, and store our data? What do we do when our software, let alone our brains, cannot keep up? What do we do when bits degrade, software and hardware go extinct, and cyberspace turns out to be a decaying maze?
Scholars rightly argue that we cannot meaningfully analyze our peer-reviewed knowledge without also archiving its primary sources. But today’s knowledge quest is universal: Our primary sources encompass all the knowledge, hopes, and dreams of humanity. ”

“ We were just starting to play around with the concept before I left. But my lead programmer was really into them, and he had a bunch of friends at MIT who were studying them in a big way."
"Right. And what I was thinking about fits in nice with what's got you all juiced. See, all this poppyshit everyone's going on about, the world wide web and the Internet, it's got me a little ticked off. It's supposed to be the world's greatest 'new' information source, yet getting connected is a bitch. ”

“ You've thought through your research question and decided to use the Internet to find information either because you've already tried traditional sources without success or you believe the Internet is your best option. You're sitting in front of your terminal, you've logged onto the Internet and you're staring at a blank screen. Now what? Let's start with a (relatively) easy type of search. You need to find general information about a fairly broad topic. Let's say you need to research a broad topic unfamiliar to you, for example, Java. ”

“ But, another student noted, “Depending on the technology (internet connection and a reliable PC) and sources we have access to, it affects the information we add to the article, and that in turn affects what information the public gets access to.” The Wikipedia project made tangible lessons about the importance of understanding the cultural, material, and human infrastructures of digital technologies and critically addressing questions of representation and access to Internet-based media and communication technologies. ”

“ I said "let's" you do the Star Trek Communicator, and Transporter, and Replicator functions because it will soon be obvious that those "Information Rich" who had free access to the Internet for so long want to do an Internet Monopoly thing to ensure that what was free, to the Information Rich, will no longer be free for a class of the Information Poor. ”

“ Ideally, of course, intelligent applications won't be dependent on a single commercial site, like Freebase, but will merge and combine knowledge from various sites across the Web, crawling and trawling for more useful information and deciding which bits of it to trust. ”

“ Ten years ago, the Internet was the mystical province of physicists; today, it is a commonplace encyclopedia for millions of schoolchildren. Scientists now are decoding the blueprint of human life. Cures for our most feared illnesses seem close at hand.
The world is no longer divided into two hostile camps. ”

“ Exploring the Internet is the result of this odyssey. This book demonstrates what many of us have long felt: the worldwide network is here. Interoperability is not some imaginary goal at vendor briefings, but a concrete part of networks all over the world.
This book is more than just a series of case studies—it is truly a technical travelogue. As we read about the worldwide spread of the Internet, we get to appreciate its diversity and its usefulness to millions. This is not some experimental research environment, some academic toy, it is a real tool used by real people. ”

“ And there are other trends in search that are going to have a major impact on users, love them or hate them. Among these are greater personalization of search, an area in which Google, Yahoo, and Live Search are all vying for your attention. Then there is the concept of social networking, through which Internet users with similar interests share their web knowledge and experience. Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us or digg and sharing software such as Stumbleupon are growing in popularity as individual users seek ways to help each other discover and propagate information. ”

“ We were asked today to speak about open innovation and Wikipedia is an incredible example of this, communities coming together collaboratively to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. At Wikimedia, our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge and we take this incredibly seriously. ”

“ By placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge we can see that, since piracy is not only an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape but can potentially drive progressive developments in communication practices, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge. ”

“ In 2008, the Internet’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, reflecting on his topsy-turvy child, noted that the Web’s vast emergent properties are perhaps best modelled by biological concepts, such as plasticity, population dynamics, food chains, and ecosystems. ”

“ Exploring the Internet really is a technical travelogue, a narrative description of the people and networks I encountered during my travels. In my visits, I saw something the ITU and the rest of the standards bureaucracy seem to have missed. The Internet is here and it is not an academic toy. ”

“ In fact, in many cases, the reality is even worse: there appears to be a complete ignorance about the value of the public domain. Property's opposite, its outside, is getting short shrift. 47
To paraphrase a song from my youth, "how did we get here?" Where should we turn to understand the role of intellectual property in the era of the Internet and the decoding of the human genome? We could turn to the cutting edge of technology or to economics or information theory. ”

“ While this loose-knit band of anarchists that were defining an Internet based on open standards were free to ignore most of the nonsense coming out of the "standards professionals" and their "Open Systems Interconnection" effort—there was one thing we couldn't ignore and that was the telephone network on which we built our unreliable, best-effort datagram service. ”

“ Indeed, let us concede that the whole history of the Web, from Wikipedia to the obsessive and usefully detailed sites created on everything from Vikings to shoe polishes, shows a desire to share one's knowledge, to build on the work of others one has never met. These efforts are remarkably varied. Some are ultimately aimed at profit—even if their results are free. Think of IBM's open source initiatives or musicians who release Creative Commons- licensed work in order to get more club gigs. ”

“ The network, the sponta- neously grown information organism that covers most of the planet Earth. I believe that is why all hackers start hacking. Innate curiosity about the way things work. Then, before our eyes, and behind the back of the world, the planet gets connected, totally connected to each other, and we haven't examined the ramifica- tions of that closeness, computer-wise that is. That's what we do." The Spook sounded satisfied with his explanation. ”

“ In three trips around the world, I talked to people on the front lines: people who make computers, people who create networks, and people who use them. To explain to the bureaucracies facts that are painfully obvious to the rest of us, I had to leave the confines of meeting rooms and fancy hotels and go into the research laboratories, network operating centers, and bars and restaurants where real work happens. ”

“ The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet as cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or rather ordinary. ”