Google and the Net

Nomen Nescio nobody at dizum.com
Tue Oct 9 14:40:14 PDT 2001


> >> Steve Mynott[SMTP:steve at tightrope.demon.co.uk] wrote:
> >> Every thought how bad the net would be if google went away?
> >>
> > Actually, us old timers remember what it was like before google,
>
> Hypertext in general is doubleplus good.
>
> I remember Gopher, Archie, and all of those crufty tools.

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.





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