A great deal has been written about ‘the semantic web’, suggesting this might be a liberating force in helping people to find information on the web. Before this happens there are a whole number of things that could happen to make it easier to find things:

i) create a browser that enables the user to constantly tick a box to say whether they want to ever find similar websites like the one they’ve just opened. So I would tick a box to say I don’t want websites covered in adverts.

ii) metadata about the creator; something along the lines of ‘I’m convinced I’m going to become a dot com millionaire so I’m building a website about all the supermarkets in Europe’. I would avoid all of them as well.

iii) most websites involved in the holiday industry. There are only about four websites I’ve ever found that are of any use and I stick to them; they work very well, I don’t want the dross.

iv) and websites that have really poor information architecture (at least 60%+) - if the user could tick that box as well, that would be useful.

So maybe one of the ways forward is a smarter browser. Maybe you might have to pay a few quid for it - but if it reduced the dross and stripped out the sites that are really nothing more than bill boards,  I for one might pay for it.

And all of this because I’m trying to find out the opening times of supermarkets in various towns in Normandy, because from past experience, everything can close from 1pm on a Saturday and we’re trying to plan how much food to pack into our cycle panniers for forthcoming French trip.

You would think it would be easy. But no. And I don’t see how the semantic web will solve this problem when the quality of so much existing information is so poor.

We will make sure we’ve got some spare pasta, garlic, onion, tomatoes, herbs, tea bags and so on …