It’s getting silly isn’t it. Type something in your favourite search engine and what do you get? Well, I just tried “search engines” and look what gets thrown up:

Results 1 - 30 of about 79,300,000 for “search engines”. (0.21 seconds) (Google)

Results 1 - 10 of about 98,900,000 for “search engines” - 0.21 sec. (Yahoo!)

Page 1 of 36,937,573 results containing “search engines” (0.16 seconds) (MSN)

At one level, some basic categorisation would be helpful but it’s difficult to see how this would work or be regulated. Previous attempts at using keyword metadata seem to have been comprehensively wrecked by pornographers, spammers, malcontents and people who need deep therapy to address their weird anti-social behaviour. Categorisation might fail in the same way.

I do sometimes use dmoz but don’t find it that useful. For example, the top level category of ‘ computers ‘ doesn’t have an obvious second level category of ’search engines’.

Out walking the other day we were granted the free spectacle of some superb herringbone clouds. I couldn’t remember what these signified and spent 10 minutes googling away to no avail. I tried a more specific search of ‘herringbone clouds’ in the science/earth-sciences/meteorology part of dmoz which produced no results.

Maybe expectations have got too high. But I’m sure there’s some good information somewhere on the web. The problem now for the web however is the organisation of the information. And is this possible with the web in its current form? I don’t think so. The flat open access of the web works against that.

What’s the answers? I cannot see the web continuing in its current form and there is no reason why it should. It has continually morphed as it’s developed and as it global reach as widened as well as the depth of content increasing. More functionality such as transactions, telephony, radio, sound, animation, video clips and so on have been added. This will continue and develop further.

The next developments may be bigger and more challenging to the cultural concepts we’ve been radicalised to, and quickly become entrenched with. A pay per view web? A web where certain information - from academic institutions, from government agencies, from ‘certified partners’, from peer reviewed magazines, from editorial boards - is welded together in walled gardens with pay access.

Would anyone pay for this? Well some organisations might. I suspect they might pay to be on it, and pay to be part of it. For many organisations it would help with management control (often a much bigger factor than is admitted) and it would help with authentication and verification of data. It would mean that when staff were using the ‘walled garden’ internet to search, they would be searching other sites which have agreed to certain protocols and standards. In effect it will be the development of two internets, one of quality assured data, and one where ‘anything goes’.

An example of how the former might look in practice is something like the Directgov project being produced in UK, developing into a portal of all local authority web resources. Is this going to be the future of public information?

And for some local authorities it will help save the embarrasment of one council which was forced to reveal the surfing habits of its own staff following a clever FOI request from the local paper, the Cobham News & Mail (I won’t link to their site as it’s been ‘loading’ on a Mozilla tab for about 10 minutes now with nothing doing*. The story was originally in the Municipal Journal but I can’t find any website for that *at all*).

This request revealed 24.182 separate website hits by staff - with eBay getting more than 3000 hits a day. Friends Reunited was also popular, as were jobs - in other councils.

98 million hits for one search, no hits for another, open access leading to staff searching non-work related sites…it can’t go on; can it?

* By a strange coincidence this page finally finished loading as I finished this entry - to tell me that I could access 10 articles for £5 or the complete archive for a year for £50.