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"What can you not find online?"
04/28/2004 Entry
There has been much hype about how the Internet and especially search engines (need I name the one in particular?;) are giving everyone everywhere access to anything and everything. I’ve already commented previously about why this simplifies matters (even beyond controlling for mere access issues), but let’s limit our discussion to people who are quite skilled at online information-seeking. What remains – or may increasingly become – hard to access?
Here are some examples. I’d be curious in what other instances people have encountered or perhaps expect to encounter roadblocks at some point.
I have previously discussed the problem of closed systems with respect to course syllabi. Increasingly they are posted on password-protected sites making them hard to access on the open Web. I also continue to be amazed at how few academics post e-copies of their publications on their Web sites. Is it wrong of me to be especially surprised when the academics in question study the Internet in particular? Sure, my academic institution subscribes to many of the publications (although certainly not all) in which academic articles get published, but such subscriptions are only available to a tiny fraction of Web users. (I know, I know, probably only a tiny fraction of Web users are interested in academic publications in the first place, but still, these are examples of gated content.) Many magazines also do not make their articles available to users who are not subscribers.
How about controversial materials? With increasing pressure from various actors (e.g. groups representing commercial or political interests) will we see more material censored or made harder to access? Already Web sites about certain topics are less directly accessible than one might think. (Is it really mere popularity and linking structure that leads to safersex.org as the first hit when you search for sex on Google? Granted, a search for porn seems to lead to more general sites at the top of the list, although I didn’t click through to verify.) And remember the Google vs Church of Scientology case?
I also find it harder to search for some things in other languages. Sometimes it is difficult because it is unclear whether the content is included with or without language-specific characters and so you have to search using both accented and unaccented letters, a practice that can get tedious.
People who have unique names - a good chunk of Timberites, for example - are much easier to pin down on the Web than people who share names with hundreds if not thousands of others. If you are looking for information about a person from the latter group it may be more difficult, even if you do know where the person works or in what town he or she lives. Much information about people seems to be on sites that require registration. Sure, membership is often open to anyone, but the contents of sites like Friendster are not indexed by search engines as far as I know (and people likely use all sorts of nicknames anyway).
Google – to name just one search engine – has some code-dependent limitations built in that makes certain searches difficult. For example, it only allows for a maximum of ten terms in a search query. If you are looking for exact phrases, this can be limiting at times.
In what other cases have you faced search challenges or expect things to get more difficult as time goes on and more materials become proprietary or get hidden due to contoversial status? Do you think I am exaggerating the difficulty of the cases mentioned above?
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