(Still) Looking for _____ in All the Wrong Places!

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Is it just me, or has the state of Internet searching gone way downhill?

I used to feel like I could find just about anything on the Internet, even answers to such esoteric questions as “Why do the gods sleep with the fishes?”* But lately, it seems like it’s pure pot-luck finding useful information that I don’t have to pay for .

Oh sure, every now and then I do get lucky, such as recently when searching for skits that my son’s Cub Scout den can perform at their upcoming Blue & Gold dinner; I found one website with more than 80 skits, nicely formatted and ready to go, but that was only after about 15 minutes of pure hit-or-miss searching from the hits I got off of Yahoo’s search engine.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the state of Internet searching: 85,000 hits, and then good luck sifting through them to find what you really want.

A long, long time ago (i.e., about 1997--has it really only been five years?), search engines were going to be the first big “killer apps” on the Internet. They were going to monopolize Internet traffic by putting all the information in the world at your fingertips, and then make a bazillion bucks when advertisers paid through the nose to reach all those “eyeballs.”

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.