Would anybody notice?


Even were someone to "clean up" ten percent of the web, to magically make a significant percentage disappear, I doubt that many people would discern that anything had changed. And that's not just because even then the web would still be unfathomably vast. Considering that most search engine searches never go beyond the second page of results, it hardly matters that we'll have 300,000 hits instead of a previous 3,000,000. And of course the continuing improvements in the ability of search engines to actually bring us the results we want succeed in separating us from the uncharted and threatening territory that lies beyond what we think we're looking for.

Even as the web continues to expand into greater and greater degrees of vastness, our increasing ability to more readily zoom in on what we need (or at least on what we think we need) causes our perception of it to be that it's contracting.



Go to: Inventing wheels in cyberspace.