Posted by admin on June 8th, 2009 in Internet Use, Technology

I love the internet.  You do too or you wouldn’t be here.  I’m fascinated by the potential of so much information.  I’ve always been an information junkie.  First it was books.  I blew through the Nancy Drew series one summer and filled my summer days with biking to our little town library (I grew up in a town of 9,000 people).  We also owned a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and I was the geek who loved to read it.  I won’t go so far as to say I read it cover to cover OR was able to remember all of what I read but I loved having access to all that information.  That’s it.  I had ACCESS to information when I wanted, whenever I wanted it.

I first learned of the internet when we lived in France.  I had just given birth to our son and had a 2 year old daughter running around the farmhouse.  Someone visited the States and brought us a computer where we promptly set up an email account.  Remember the ones with the numbers?  That’s what ours was – a series of numbers.  A Compuserve account in fact.  By the time we lived in Geneva ( 2 1/2 years later) the internet seemed to be picking up steam and I was ready to use it to help research our move back to the States.  I can distinctly remember saying to my husband, “How can it ever be useful  if everyone isn’t on it?”  I wanted EVERYONE to be on it right THEN.  I felt positively giddy thinking of all the information that could be made available at my fingertips. Yet, it was painfully obvious that it was impossible to do a thorough job planning a move only with internet derived information.  There just simply weren’t enough realtors, moving companies, local city information and school information online to satisfy my need for comparison research for a move. That was 1998.

It’s funny to think about that time now.  Ironic too, considering I spend so much time online writing, researching and conducting my personal and business on it all day long.  Which brings me to an introduction that happened this week.   You may have heard about Microsoft’s new Search Engine called “Bing“.  But, if you haven’t, I’m featuring a video on my site that describes it.  I also am featuring a video that discusses the concept of “Search” (as we define it today).

These days, the problem isn’t too little online, it’s that there’s too much information online.  You could spend hours digging deep into a subject and still walk away without quality source material.  I’m glad there are people thinking about this and trying to streamline information because the internet keeps getting bigger, filling up with both good and spammy stuff all the time.  At some point, we are wasting as much time finding information as we are saving time using the internet.  There are still many situations where I will consult a book rather than the computer because it is more efficient.  My teenagers don’t think this way.   They’ve used the Internet since they were 2nd and 3rd grade.   And, although my 16 year old daughter has always enjoyed reading, she never consults a book the way I would.  My son never enjoyed reading books so he skipped over them completely in favor of computers.  So, I do have a vested interest in the evolution and development of Search Tools.  It is THEIR world.