Google and the Net

[Steve Schear]

At 11:40 PM 10/9/2001 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>You are all missing the point.  Google was being praised for its specific
>feature of acting as an internet-wide cache of old versions of web pages.
>Prior to 9/11 the page in question held inflammatory content praising
>bin Laden.  Now it's been pulled.  The google cache lets us see the
>previous version, thwarting the efforts of the page owner to hide his
>earlier sentiments.
>
>Google thus serves as an honesty mechanism, holding people responsible
>for what they have said and making it more difficult for them to conceal
>revisions to their published opinions.
>
>All this old-fogey talk about "I remember the days before Google" is
>nothing but hot air.  Sure, things were harder before search engines;
>of course they were, but it's a trivial observation.  The point is that
>this often-unappreciated cacheing feature of search engines can have a
>powerful influence on the nature of the Web.
>
>It's unfortunate that we have to rely on Google.  Imagine an ongoing,
>distributed project to cache the web.  Volunteers could keep tabs on
>a subset of corporate and personal web pages and cache old versions
>when changes are made.  Rewriting history becomes that much harder.
>And it's certainly a better use of computers than seti at home.

This is actually an excellent application front end for a Mojo Nation type 
system, as the data is redundant and distributed.