The Internet Superstore?
The internet was invented by the U.S. military around 1958. Here we are in 2008 and it is enormously large and useful. At some point isn’t the information on the internet going to be nearly unusable due to shear volume! Maybe I am missing something. I just can’t see the rate at which new web sites are created as being “no problem” in the future.
To me it is equivalent to every Wal-Mart soon becoming the size of entire towns. Imagine how long that would take you to shop! First you had local corner grocers and hardware stores that every one shopped at, and it was easy to find items due to the conveniently small size of the stores.
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Later you had major grocery store chains with larger stores and large hardware stores such as Ace. Still it wasn’t too bad to shop and we welcomed the increase in products, although it did take longer to shop due to the larger stores and you had to drive two different places.
Now you have superstores carrying all your hardware and food needs, as well as anything else you may need (let’s face it, a person could exclusively shop at Wal-Mart and no where else, and be perfectly fine in life).
In any case, the superstore is supposedly a help to the shopper because all your needs, plus some, are located in one store, even though it takes forever to go shopping at one of these stores. At some point won’t the shear size of the store be counter-productive to the consumer?
So the internet is like a superstore getting “more super” every day. I could not readily find information on how many websites or web pages are created each day, but it has to be a shit load!!!
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This is especially true since, ever increasingly, people are trying to make money from websites, and more and more people are learning how to create websites. It is unlikely that any search engine like Google will ever be able to return even 90% of relative pages for any particular search term, so will this just get harder and harder for them.
At some point this madness will not be good for the user, because the enormous volume of information will not get to them because it is too much to look through, or make sense out of. The user will only be using the 20 or so web sites that come up in the first iteration of a search (users do that already), leaving potentially better information lost farther down the list in the search engine.
This can only get worse, almost like shopping for hundreds of faucets at a “town size” hardware store, when finally you just pick one due to information overload. The user (i.e. customer) will increasingly get poorer and poorer “service” as the number of websites increase.
We are at the mercy of the search engines to pick us the best sites and put them on the first few pages, but we have no idea what criteria their algorithms use to do this. Many extremely good and useful sites are not ranked high because they are not optimized. An internet user will rarely see these sites.
This can only get worse.
