The Next Best thing to Sliced Bread: Search Engines

I love the internet! What I really mean to say is that the single most useful tool that I have found in life is the search engine. When I was young and I did not know what a word meant, I would ask my mother. Her response would invariably be, “go look it up in the dictionary.” Dictionaries are great, please do not misunderstand me, but they are limited in the amount of information they can provide you. A dictionary provides correct pronunciation of a word, meaning, origin (when looking up the word pugnacious you might expect to read in the entry: from the Latin verb pugno, to fight) and possibly alternate forms of the word. But what about when you want to find out about Connecticut Liquor laws or the name of the Prince album which contains the song, “P Control?” Where do you go, to an encyclopedia? Hardly, the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia would never cover both of those topics. Print reference is just not an option anymore. That is why I can not imagine a world without the World Wide Web. The name of the first computer program that became the model for the web we know today was named after a Victorian era book Enquire Within upon Everything, the program was called Enquire for short. The book, according to the program’s creator and thus father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, seemed almost magical when he discovered it as a child: containing advice on everything from stain remove to investment strategies. Berners-Lee seemed to feel that that type of advice was not the goal of, but a primitive starting point for the web. However, I think that the idea that anyone in any industrialized country with a PC and a web connection can find out that Connecticut bowling alleys cannot serve alcohol before two pm on any day without exception and that “P Control” is on Prince’s 1995 out-of-print masterpiece The Gold Experience is truly awe inspiring. Knowledge is power, and although you cannot trust everything you find on the web the same can be said for what you read in books. However, I do want to recommend that everyone read Tim Berners-Lee’s book, Weaving the Web is a first hand account of how the World Wide Web came to be and a great summer read.