Will it ever be possible to Organize the Internet

[Robert Zwilling]

Many articles on the internet soar up into view like sky rockets, then land in an ocean of articles, stories, ads, letters, recipes and entertainment, where the article sinks out of sight, usually forgotten. Only searching brings the articles back to light again. What practical methods are used so articles form vertical chains that form continuous links back to previous articles instead of being stored in horizontal layers disconnected from each other.

 

[Harpo]

How to organise the internet.

1: go back in time half a century.
2: organise the earliest bits of what would eventually become the internet.
3: when Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web, don’t just let him give it to the entire world without some sort of organising being involved.
4: er….
5: that’s it.

 

[hitmouse]

No.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

ouch

 

[Swank]

I honestly don't understand the question. Where is this article, and what do you think of as the "surface of the internet"? Do you expect search results to always put an old article above everything else?

 

[Dave]

What practical methods are used so articles form vertical chains that form continuous links back to previous articles instead of being stored in horizontal layers disconnected from each other.

The problem with most search engines (and the most popular but not all) is that they are arranged in the order of the advertiser who pays the most and how many times accessed (how popular) the article is. It has nothing to do with relevance, or date, and it will ignore your keywords or even those (negative - keywords) that you put in the search. However, you can still use various tools using an Advanced Search or else click on "More" which then brings up "Any country, Any time, All results" and within those you can search much more precisely. It still isn't as accurate as it once was. This is called Progress.

 

[REBerg]

I asked the Internet

Will it ever be possible to Organize the Internet? - Google Search

 

[Robert Zwilling]

I clicked on will it ever be possible to organize the internet?
after googles smart reply, the first result google picked for me was this:

Will it ever be possible to Organize the Internet​

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https://www.sffchronicles.com › Discussion › Technology




22 hours ago — How to organise the internet. 1: go back in time half a century. 2: organise the earliest bits of what would eventually become the internet. 3: ...

Once a report of a situation that is not one off is started I would like to be able to easily find follow up stories as the situation doesn't disappear, it just goes to the back burner, replaced by another trending situation.

 

[Swank]

Once a report of a situation that is not one off is started I would like to be able to easily find follow up stories as the situation doesn't disappear, it just goes to the back burner, replaced by another trending situation.

That's primarily the fault of the news group that put out the first article, isn't it? Like a series without an ending.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

That's primarily the fault of the news group that put out the first article, isn't it? Like a series without an ending.

Absolutely true.
The practice also promotes forgetfulness, possibly intentional or just the way process works.
Would a link in an article that runs a search that finds articles directly related to the article it was in be useful. Usually the links are generic or lead to one particular article.

 

[Swank]

Absolutely true.
The practice also promotes forgetfulness, possibly intentional or just the way process works.
Would a link in an article that runs a search that finds articles directly related to the article it was in be useful. Usually the links are generic or lead to one particular article.

Aside from the problem of forgetful news, seems like you just need a better search engine.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

I have no trouble with the search engines, i try a lot of different approaches. i just hate to waste a couple of bottles of water to get copilots take.

 

[Montero]

i just hate to waste a couple of bottles of water to get copilots take.

I don't understand your analogy, would you mind explaining?

 

[SilentRoamer]

From a purely technical perspective, the internet is organized - if it wasn't then it wouldn't work.

The internets organization are provided by IP Addresses which are mapped to Domain Names that can be easily used via DNS.

Asking "will it be possible to organise the internet " is like asking why all of the Libraries in the world aren't all organised and catalogued together - which is not completely analogous but servers to highlight the point.

Search engines and the results they push out are nothing to do with the underlying organisational structure of the internet, to continue the above analogy - if you can't use the index properly, doesn't mean the information isn't there.

 

[Vertigo]

From a purely technical perspective, the internet is organized - if it wasn't then it wouldn't work.

The internets organization are provided by IP Addresses which are mapped to Domain Names that can be easily used via DNS.

Asking "will it be possible to organise the internet " is like asking why all of the Libraries in the world aren't all organised and catalogued together - which is not completely analogous but servers to highlight the point.

Search engines and the results they push out are nothing to do with the underlying organisational structure of the internet, to continue the above analogy - if you can't use the index properly, doesn't mean the information isn't there.

I was about to say almost exactly this! It's not a new problem and I don't think there has ever been or ever will be a comprehensive answer. The problem today is the step change increase in volume of data brought about by the internet. On the other hand I have never before in my life had access to the level of information that is at my finger tips now. Sure I have to do some checking but that takes a fraction of the time it used to take when you were reliant on going to the library, or even multiple libraries, and spending days, weeks, months or years searching for the information you want.

When it comesto serious research the papers will always post links to their sources. This has always been the case asd is still the same today so long as the authors can be bothered. All Wikipedia articles have a bottom section with links to their sources. If not, or if they're no good, they are pretty quickly dumped.

I really don't see how much more you want. It seems parallel to the persistent instant gratification culture we seem to live in. With so much information available you have to accept that some time and effort are always going to be required to discover the full story about pretty much anything.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

i just hate to waste a couple of bottles of water to get copilots take.

That refers to the extra amount of energy that AI responses use in comparison tp ordinary search requests. The extra energy increases the amount of water needed to cool the computers, the amount of which is all over the place. It can be seen by the total amount of increase in water usage from the main source of water.
The standard answer seems to be half a liter for every 20 questions.

This article covers the electricity possibly used. Training uses a lot of energy but that is only done once, which is true for many things. Using it after it has been set up is what is being looked at. AI often needs several attempts to get what you are looking for. Creating images uses more energy than answering questions. The amount of power used to run an AI system isn't public knowledge any more as that could give the competition an idea of how effective the setup is. AI centers definitely use more power than traditional data centers whose power usage was more or less predictable and operated within known limits. AI centers need increasingly larger amounts of energy to run and cool them as the current solution of how to make progress seems to be making the machine bigger and faster.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The framework that contains the internet is like a cup that contains a cup of water. The shape of the cup has nothing to do with where the water is located, and the water does move around but the shape of the cup does nothing to signify where the water molecules have moved to. The program that the cup represents does nothing to control how the water organizes itself in the cup.

Libraries have a coding system that makes it very easy to locate all the books related to one topic. The code tells you the topic and the location. The internet only tells you the location but not the topic.

There are certain things I follow that are not easily tracked. One example is the amount of damage that goes unrepaired after severe weather events. The amount of unrepaired damage is increasing as time goes on, more so in some areas compared to other areas. It would be nice to be able to see how this is playing out but the reports are all over the place and not always reported. Another one is dark energy, the information being discovered continues to bring up new discoveries which only serve to lessen the understanding of what it means. Tracking energy consumption of various enterprises would be another way of seeing what is going on in the world. But the world is going in another direction where total transparency is being replaced by a complete lack of transparency.

Information clearing houses exist but they are designed to collect like minded positions with an eye towards arriving at a common predetermined goal. There are times when no answer is in sight and until that goal is reached all sides have to be brought under one roof which is probably never going to happen. The constant need to come up with a single answer needs to be replaced by a collection of questions that point to different scenarios that lead to different solutions which when combined create a practical answer for a problem.

 

[Vertigo]

To me what you are describing is social media, not the internet. Responsible news services keep their data extremely well organised with their own search engines and lots of cross links in their articles (take a browse around a few BBC news articles). And library indexing often falls down when a particular book covers many different subjects. I would still make a strong bet that I could find more good information on a given topic and in a given span of time than you ever could in a library. I'm not knocking libraries but they simply cannot be searched in anything like the same speed and once you have the book it becomes even harder depending on how well indexed it is. And in libraries it's still perfectly possible that you search might end up pointing you to the likes of Erich Von Daniken. Just because something is published and in a library does not automatically guarantee its quality.

And all those people keeping their emails and other data on the internet rather than local storage are probably consuming way more power than a few searches.

 

[Swank]

The central problem is that the internet is not full of information, it is full of words and images. Those could be fiction, nonfiction or something very much in between. There is no attempt on the part of people posting things to the internet to classify their output, so even the most basic data is competing with a swath of non-data.

But the internet is also an access point to actually libraries and databases where people only input real stuff. And if someone isn't doing that professionally for the kind of data you want, you aren't going to be able to substitute the flea market of general internet traffic. It is mostly garbage.

 

[Vertigo]

The central problem is that the internet is not full of information, it is full of words and images. Those could be fiction, nonfiction or something very much in between. There is no attempt on the part of people posting things to the internet to classify their output, so even the most basic data is competing with a swath of non-data.

But the internet is also an access point to actually libraries and databases where people only input real stuff. And if someone isn't doing that professionally for the kind of data you want, you aren't going to be able to substitute the flea market of general internet traffic. It is mostly garbage.

Very true, but the same could be said of the entire bulk of published material. The majority is garbage. You just have to be aware of your sources and double/triple check everything. But again, the same could be said of published paper information. And this has always been the case; just take a look at all the Victorian published spiritualism material that was frequently treated as scientific despite a complete lack of solid evidence.

I really think that the only thing that has changed significantly is the scale!