NewsHour Backgrounders
December 30, 1996: Will information traffic jams increase in cyberspace?
December 25, 1996: The NewsHour reviews the Year in Cyberspace.
Browse the Online NewsHour's coverage of cyberspace.
|
Mark DeYoung of Hollis, NH, asks:
Even when armed with a powerful search engine, there is so much junk
floating around in the Web's data bases that searching for specific
information can be like looking for the John Smith that you grew up with
in New York City (1437 matches found).
What ever the case, do you forsee anything happenning in the future to
clean up Web Trash? Is this just going to have to be an initiative of
search engine managers?
Jon Katz responds:
I'm not sure about search engines. I forwarded your question to a WIRED
engineer who works with search engines, and he says in one or two years the
search technology will be much faster and more advanced, particularly when
more wideband ISDN lines and other faster transmission means are available.
These machines will probably do a much more focused job of sorting
information and presenting options. The problem, it seems to me, is that it
still takes most people too much time to squeeze this information through
their telephone lines, and ISDN lines and other faster means of transmission
are still too expensive. This is an area research companies are spending a
fortune on, though, and my guess is that in a few years the search engines
will be much more powerful and intuitive than anything we know now.
Continue to next question...
|
