Web searching died the day they invented SEO

The truth is out there but you’ll never find it
By Alistair Dabbs 2 Feb 2018 at 09:03
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Something for the Weekend, Sir? You can find anything on the internet apart from the specific thing you’re looking for.

No wonder the boffins at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are bigging up the enormity of the task of decoding data from its recently rediscovered zombie satellite. They probably did a web search for the old system and came up with a blank.

Horror of horrors, this means they’ll have to reverse-engineer the whole thing. What a nightmare. I mean, no one programs any more, they just nick code snippets off Github and for the rest throw in a heap of lard-arsed libraries. Now they’ll have to recreate it all from scratch.

Hang on, though. Surely, surely someone somewhere at some point saved references to the necessary source code in a document, and surely these ended up in a digital repository that can be accessed on the internet. Why can’t they find it?

I imagine they found references to references. They probably unearthed news stories about the satellite, along with images, timelines, background information and so on. But not the program itself.

I repeat: you can find anything on the internet apart from the specific thing you’re looking for. It’s Dabbsy’s Principal Law of Web Search.

Sure, I can find links generally related to what I’m hunting very quickly. Internet searching has never been so easy or reliable as it is now. However, I always seem to end up wading through stuff that’s generally related to the prize I’m after, rather than the prize itself.

Surely the internet is big enough to contain all human intelligence. So why is it so difficult to find precisely the right thing when you need it? Truth or otherwise, as the gender-pay-imbalanced Mulder might say, it must be out there.

Perhaps I’m not searching the internet properly. This might be a reflection on my inadequate search skills. Like the public at large, I have grown lazy with unrefined web searches. Operators? Nah. Tags? Maybe next time. Quote marks? Such a pain. Boolean? Do me a favour.

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My two cents on this one: in 2010 when the Facebook movie came out and the flood of social media took place, everyone was scrambling to take hold of the organic searching. I’m sure even back as far as 2007 or more with the meta tags in the websites, jockeying for rank on the search engines was the big thing. SEO become more and more necessary. I can’t tell you how much money was spent learning these avenues from gurus online, and hearing others do the same. Once the bigger companies like Adobe, Google, Microsoft got wind of the common Joe and Joe-ett or is that Jolene; anyhow, once they figured out how the rest of us were able to minipulate and get our faces and companies up on top of the search engines. They stopped the organic searching and started in on the ” we will tell you want you need to see,” and “you need to pay to get up front,” oh and my fav “you need to pay for ANOTHER school to get certified”


About the author

IT Professional and Military Veteran with 30 years of proven ability to interact and collaborate with multiple levels of management and diverse cultural audiences. Consistently achieved exceptional and measurable results while leading teams in dynamic, fast-paced environments in both civilian and military capacities. Possess a comprehensive background in designing, developing, and implementing Information Technology, Health Care, and Social Media Strategies for large corporate and small business and Health Care organizations. Possess extensive knowledge in Project/Change and Life Cycle Management within HIT, HIS, IS & IT, Customer Service. Background Desktop Management, Help Desk Operations, and Risk Assessment. Recipient of multiple awards for outstanding performance and professionalism in the United States Army. Career supported by military training and an Information Technology Project Management Certificate. • Strategic Planning • Process Improvement • Communications • Statistical Analysis • Leadership / Mentorship • Customer Service • Risk Assessment • Integrity • Disaster Management