I'm lucky I wrote that.
In a serendipitous example of associative writing, I realized that while
working on what has come to be known as Something Much
I didn't search for at least most of the articles that I couldn't find via Google.
So? A search engine is a search engine is a search engine, even taking various
differences into consideration. Except one. The idea of an academic Napster that
would allow us to access articles that aren't available on the web "even though
they were once published on the web" as I wrote, clicked with me. One of the nicest
features of Google is a link entitled cached. Even if the URL of a page
leads to a dead end, the cached link leads to the page as it was when Google
catalogued it. Why hadn't I thought of that back then!
Sure enough, I rifled through my lists of notes and found the title
of an article which I couldn't find. I searched for it in Google and clicked
on the link that came up. As was to be expected, I got a "no longer there"
message. And then.... And then I clicked on the cached link. The
entire article (am I lucky it wrote about hypertext but didn't use it)
appeared before me, part of the vast resources of Google. Although late,
I was still lucky, but I'd still like something along the lines of an academic
Napster.