Last thing

“What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?”

About the “last thing’ I have replied here. I just want to expand on this wider question: why do we search, and why on line? The worldwide web was created to ease documents searches at CERN. This history is well known. However the web soon became a battle ground for corporates that could not suffer something that big not being proprietary, as TBL wished: another well known story.

The latest episode of attempts at killing relatively independent platforms is part of this. So, when we do a search, we try to fight our way through a series of obstacles, created to either attract us to commit to one of the big proprietary constructions (multiple choice here) or get us to pay for what was supposed to be free and open. Please note that I am not referring to (small) businesses run on the web (by gifted individuals or small groups), or enthusiastic bloggers trying to make a bit of cash through charging, usually, small amounts to access content, but to the usual and well known predators.

Creation

Admittedly we, users and bloggers, compound the problem with our naivety, since, in our majority, we fail to protect our own creation. Our searches are trying to find a way to reach content we are interested in, or retrace things we read, people we know, a song lyrics, all things legitimate to search for. How successful we are in turn depends on these sorcerers of our time: search engines. Indeed for bloggers who wish to increase their visibility “SEO” – Search Engine Optimisation – has now reached the status of black art. Reasons for searches being successful or not are multiple and somewhat obscure (as this last search of mine demonstrated, to me at least).

This leads me to another consideration, the name I searched for belonged to a person who changed it, reinvented herself, and, as far as I can tell, erased part of her footprint on the web. All legitimate actions, for our identity belongs to us, or so we hope. The web, or more generally the “ internet”, has nonetheless, a long memory, though things can be erased. The ambiguity of our presence on line, is it ours, or does it already belong to others, will remain, despite all efforts to protect both freedom of speech, and privacy.

This dilemma is inherent to the technology (TCP-IP and all that), originally created to facilitate communication between powerful centres of knowledge. Adding to this that all current computer operating systems (the brains behind it all) all, with the notable exception of Microsoft OS, derive from the same Unix, we can appreciate that this is a small world indeed, all issued from geniuses at DARPA in the 50’s and 60’s.

Clouds and Drives

Where does that leave our searches? Most of us accumulate more and more content on line, starting with email. Services like Proton Drive and others facilitate private exchange of content, or so would do with the usual caveat on “private”. Taking the example of one of my pieces in writing, which I have nearly all published on my public blog, is there any value for me, or my readers, to actually publish it, in book form (digital or print), or should I just enable it for sharing on Proton Drive?

The latter means that this material, if I were to make it no longer public, on the blog, would end up not being “discoverable”. This ends up creating a hierarchy of readers: those with free access, those with paying access, and those with no access, at least until given the key. This is the present situation for most content today.

Print!

It can be seen, that in the case of a novel, written to be read for whoever wishes to, the printed book form is by far the most flexible: it can be searched from the web, or library indices, and can be acquired, usually for a modest price.

The Complete History of the World Wide Web (From Web1 to Web3)