From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Dec 29 2001 - 17:56:53 MST
Jacques Du Pasquier wrote:
>
>
> I don't experience the Google decrease in efficiency. To the contrary
> I find it better and better, with accuracy unmatched, and with new,
> brilliant features (now it searches PDF, DOC, XLS, database files,
> etc. files ; it searches images and newsgroups...) It is what we never
> dreamt of in the Altavista days : adequate.
>
It could/should be many times more "adequate". I would like to
be able to exclude/include at will mailing list archives, portal
pages and so on. When I say I want only English that should be
all I get, it is not necessarily so today. Quoted phrases are
not always taken as such. Exclusions do not always exclude. I
haven't looked into it but it would be much more "adequate" if a
programmatic interface was public so the hit list could more
easily be fed to something else of one's own devising.
> I never suffered from "too many pages", or outdated pages. I would be
> happy for EVERY page ever put online to stay forever.
>
What? You have never performed a search that gave you hundreds
of thousands of hits, most of them irrelevant? You have never
clicked on broken links? I would also be much happier if the
low level protocols also included date created and date last
updated. For many topics I could care less about material more
than a few years old.
> It is funny that he should use the "entropy" concept, as the reason
> for all this outdated pages is, on the contrary, the fact that they
> are not subject to entropy. A poster in a street will not stay
> forever, due to scarce space (=> covered by some other poster) and
> entropy (decay) ; a web page will. It is order over-preserved
> (by a bit of electrical energy of server machines), not entropy.
>
Accounts go dead and any links to those pages are now dangling
pointers. This is to some small degree an increase in
disorder.
> Again there's an obvious parallel between the Internet and a
> foreseeable physical word, set free of usual physical limits. In an
> extropic world, with almost infinite space, energy, and resources, the
> people, like web pages, will not feel the effects of entropy anymore
> and will just ADD one to the other, without replacing each other.
In the case of Web pages this would not be a good thing. Much
information has an expiration date implicit to the type of
information. Keeping it all on the open web indefinitely (vs.
archives) would be like keeping every newspaper, book, magazine
you had ever seen in your office. Hmmm, actually looking at my
office this doesn't seem to be anything I have much objection
to. :)
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:12:55 MST