That damned elusive fact file
When U2 sang that they still hadn't found what they were looking for, they must have been on the internet - the world's largest source of information and yet the one thing you're trying to find remains as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel.
As more people get on the Web, both to publish as well as to browse, the process of finding your way around has become big business. In terms of buzzwords, one of this year's hottest contenders has to be portal - firms such as Yahoo, which arrange selected portions of the Web into easily digestible chunks. Rather than do an optimistic Web search on Frasier, you could head to Yahoo and drill down through the entertainment and television sections.
In this respect, portals are just like magazine contents pages, except that, of course, you'll only ever find what they think you're looking for. If you're a Web publisher and you want to be found, it's important to make sure the big portals know who you are. Most offer effective registration processes where you supply key words to describe your site. With any luck, anyone searching those words will find you.
In a recent top 100 survey of UK sites, Yahoo came in at number one, followed by the BBC, and shortly after that by some news compilation pages. The most popular sites on the internet don't actually contain original content, they are nothing more than a set of links to what the publisher reckons is good on the Web. With all that information-hungry traffic, it's no wonder that portals can charge hefty sums for advertising and prominent positions for a link to a site. To keep this revenue high, the portals need to maintain regular hits.
Too many people have spent far too long trying to find what they were looking for and, instead, turned to someone else to do all the hard work.
While offering a quick fix, it's important to try several such approaches to searching the Web's contents, or you could find yourself reading the same old information again and again - a bit like just reading one paper for the world's news and opinions all the time.
Before we get paranoid that we're being fed carefully censored material, let's briefly consider the various personal approaches behind a Web search.
Most of us frequently try feeding search engines too many words. I find it's best to try combinations of two or three key words, such as ginger, beard and balding. Then again, until the search engines understand the way words work together in context, I usually end up typing what I think are likely candidates directly into the address window - www-dot-name-of-a-company-dot-com. I've just tried this with U2 and Bono, respectively receiving nothing, and a site for those considering a career as an airline pilot - pretty useless really but turning up such unexpected results can sometimes lead to real gems. If you get bored easily, you could always turn to a portal - Yahoo quickly offered 213 U2-related sites. I still haven't found what I'm looking for, but at least I'm having a laugh while I'm at it.
Gordon Laing is a freelance IT journalist.