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Finding information

With artificial intelligence getting better and better at mimicking humans (e.g. ChatGPT, made available for free by OpenAI near the end of 2022), it is expected that the web would become even harder to navigate.

Finding information on the web is already extremely hard, unless one is searching for ads and not reliable information. This is caused by so-called SEO – practice of populating the web with text full of keywords, but rarely containing useful, reliable information. Companies want their products to be found, so they fight for the search results.

As a consequence, experienced internet users started bringing back things that used to be used before the “dot com” era: webrings, web catalogs and small search engines that don’t intend to rule the world of search. (And an alternative web space using a minimalistic protocol called Gemini, but that’s a different story.)

In my opinion, all three are important in making the web useful and reliable again:

• Webrings group web pages that are somehow related, usually focused on a given topic. They make finding additional sources much easier. Additionally, they are based on cooperation rather than competition, which encourages participation and further cooperation.
• Small search engines are very interesting in my opinion, because they are much more human-scale, but also because they seem to be useful experiments.
• Catalogs put all this information in order. When one already knows that they’re looking for information about image processing software, they just browse the Computers/Software/Graphics category. However, they immediately notice relevant sub-categories and related categories, where they may find useful information related to what they are working on.

All three retro-web tools mentioned above have one thing in common: they rely on relevance and actual human knowledge. They help find information, as opposed to just searching.

This work by Piotr Mieszkowski is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0