Some days you're the spider, some days you're the fly.
"The Web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
William Shakespeare
The
Net is changing. Not long ago, I was the predator, a ravenous cyber-spider
roaming freely, capturing and devouring tasty sites. Now I'm the fly,
caught in the Web and floundering hopelessly in search of interesting
pages.
The problem is the exponential expansion of the Web and the commercialization and blandness that come with it. As the page count - currently over 75 million - increases, the fun, interesting and quirky sites that originally lured me online become increasingly difficult to find.
"It will not in circumvention deliver a fly from a spider, without drawing their massy irons and cutting the Web."
Bill again
Unfortunately, the monster search engines that are supposed to deliver us from this tangled Web are effectively broken. Queries routinely return thousands of hits, which is not much different from no search at all. The feature most highly touted -millions of pages indexed - is rendering the sites useless. More is meaningless if you're still cut off from the information you seek.
The answer lies in the small, specialized search engines sprouting up by the hundreds on the Web. To keep track of them C|net has created the SEARCH.COM directory which offers direct access to over 400 search sites in 25 categories.
One of the most entertaining sites SEARCH.COM links to is Disinformation. It's dedicated to making "the hidden information that seldom seems to slip through the cracks of the corporate owned media conglomerates" accessible. That "hidden information" includes propaganda, countercultural notes and newspeak. So if you're looking for pages devoted to crop circles, counterintelligence, or Bible prophecy, this is the place to start.
Not all search engines roam the Web, some act as front ends to online databases. The ARTFL Project, for instance, allows you to query an online version of Roget's Thesaurus. It's extremely handy when you've already used the word "search" 9 times in an article.
Another, the Main Sanitary Nag (Anagram Insanity), scans it's database to create anagrams for phrases you enter. If you're wondering, an anagram is a word or phrase made by scrambling another word or phrase. "GET OUT Magazine," for example, becomes "Gaze into tea mug."
If the poetic implications of that transformation intrigue you, you'll probably also enjoy the many literary search engines available. As you may already suspect, my favorite is The Collected Works of Shakespeare which will scrutinize the Bard's work for specific words or phrases and link you to the relevant passages. It's a great service for students - and columnists - facing a deadline.
Which proves that, in spite of growth and commercialization, "there's magic in the Web of it."
