Spicaresque:

A Spanglish blog dedicated to the works, ruminations, and mongrel pyrotechnics of Yago S. Cura, an Argentine-American poet, translator, publisher & futbol cretin. Yago publishes Hinchas de Poesia, an online literary journal, & is the sole proprietor of Hinchas Press.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

IN/VISIBLE WE/B, OR INVISIBLE WE BE



Am I to believe that the bulk of materials on the world wide web are hidden from plain sight? The same way that the records in city halls are open to public scrutiny but rarely visited except by its custodians (lawyers, paralegals, Legalese scribes, winos with serving-papers credentials), the heft of helpful, informative, and essential databases are actual, factual, tactile (in the digital sense) but seldom used.

The problem is simple: search engines can't index web pages in which you have to enter data into fields(i.e. zip code, user name, password); they (the "spiders" that index web pages) can't log in as users to access websites that you and I use like WebMD or YouTube. When you do a search with a search engine, the spider-indexers search the hypertextmarkuplanguage of documents contained in webpages and bring back those pages that most nearly textually match the operators you wrote into the dialog box of the search engine webpage. So, when you plug "A-Rod and Madonna's baby" into a search engine, unless the pic is attached to a page that has any configuration of the aformentioned phrase, your search will retrieve no results. Your only other hope is that search engine you are using is newer generation that also checks the text in the caption or alternate heading that is usually provided by the person or organization that has uploaded the photo.

The bigger problem is that search engines do not bring back pages that have a lot of images, videos, or real-time applications like updated stock quotes(para los de alta suciedad), weather conditions(para los con el fetish del Weather Channel) and ticker headlines that cable news companies like CNN and Fox use(para los pinche conservadores). Therefore, unless you sign up for a Myspace account you will never get to access Nick Cannon's Myspace page because to a search engine machine Nick Cannon's webpage is invisible to the world wide web. It's not that it doesn't exist in real space and time, but the knowledge of it's existence is relegated to the chosen few millions that have MySpace accounts and use MySpace's internal index to locate Nick Cannon's MySpace page,ya dig?

With that said, I have heard an estimate that about 80% of the world wide web is part of the invisible web and that there are approximately 1 billion web pages that are part of the more visible world wide web. Therefore, if my math is not wrong and my math is almost always wrong, therefore, by this figure's estimates (if we extrapolate their figures, 20% of the www is visible and four times that amount is invisible, i.e. 4 billion web pages) then there really is an abundant amount of crap out there and the modern-day user really only uses about one fifth of the world wide web's digital, effervescent glow. Is this what I am supposed to believe? I entreat you.

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