| As a serious computer user getting on for 25 years using text based
search tools I've long made various "single-site" tools. A big
inspiration way back was Surfraw [1], originally created by Julian
Assange. Reality is, most of us use a small number of websites
regularly. nearly all the info I want to touch is three keystrokes
away on the command-line or from within emacs. When search died, a few years ago practically now, I was still
teaching a level-7 Research Methods course. The universities literally
did not notice that all of the advice we gave students was totally
obsolete and that it was not really possible to conduct academic
research that way. Research today is very much more like it was in the pre-interent era.
You need to curate and keep in mind a set of reliable sources and
personal, private collections. Had the misfortune of needing to spend a week using a standard browser
and sites like Google. It was beyond shocking. What I found I can only
describe as a wastescape, a war zone, a bombed-out favela with burned
out cars, overflowing sewers, piles of rubble and dead dogs lying in
gutters. My first thought was kinda, "Oh sweet Jesus Christ, what happened to my
Internet?", and the very next one was "How does anyone get anything
done now?" How does the economy still function? And of the course the
answers are "They don't" and "It doesn't". I think this is a really serious situation. There's simply no way that
as "knowledge workers", scientists, or whatever people call us now, we
can be as competitive as we were 10 or 20 years ago given the colossal
degradation of our tools. We have to stop this foolish self-deception
that things are "getting better". Google were a company that created
free search. Well done. But that was then. We remain stuck in this
strange mythology that advertising companies like Google and other
enshitified BigTech are a net asset to the economy. Surely they're a
vast parasitical drain and need digging into the ground so the rest of
us can get on with something resembling progress? [1] http://surfraw.org/ |