Reading the first chapter of On the Internet proves how much of a mess the internet is. The part that struck me the most is the example of trying to find one specific person in a football stadium, or finding one specific book in a library. As hard as that would be (especially the football stadium), the internet is much worse. Unless you have enough keywords to describe what your topic is, you're in trouble.
Gordon Rios' summary of search engines is an amazing example of the information we're not able to access on the internet. 20-30% precision on reasonable queries? That could be a good and bad thing. Good because the 20-30% of precision is keeping out about 10-20% of crap. Bad because it's keeping out a lot of information that could assist us in writings, research, etc.
The use of hyperlinks has considerably gotten better though. Unless your visiting a page from a 14-year old on Geocities, most pages now have links that will help you with a lot. Again, there does exist some web sites that are no help at all, but it is a lot better than trying to use a search engine to find a specific topic.
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