Taoffi's blog

prisonniers du temps

The end of Internet (browsers, and search engines at least!)

Communication is a vast and ancient field which ran through many evolution phases, experiments and research. Internet, as we know it today, is one of the outcomes of this human work.

In this story, no one technology proved eternal or ever-lasting. Cycles of evolution produced some usable and convenient forms of communication at a time. Internet seems to be just one of these.

But now, each time I look at a web page, I feel that just cannot last much longer (at least I hope so:)): these elastic regions, shapeless tables, unexpected fonts changes, images and colors… hazardous page reloads and other ‘partial updates’ (sometimes even more annoying)… the whole mess of plug-ins, add-ins and other artifacts…

That really doesn’t seem to be an ever-lasting model!

Searching for something on Internet is even worse. Just go search for the word ‘sequence’ and you will find yourself with a non-classified mess of subjects ranging from cinema to molecular biology!

Looking for a solution of a problem?... you may find many, often ten or fifteen years old… which rarely relates to you current question.

To keep some ‘Lasting Value’ for old archived articles, many publishers no more mention the articles’ publication date… and search engines don’t help much in finding out a time-classification of a search result. All these ‘partners’ (publishers / search engines) are happy with this. As long as the consumer (you and I) don’t complain, the business just continue to run with minimal costs!

The appropriateness between what is needed and what is offered seems to be near a break-point.

In parallel, the great rise of technologies like web services and the wide range of their implementations may just allow us to hope for something new to emerge: new stable and appealing content explorers / new relevant and coherent search engines.