Research on the Internet 2009

After four hours on the internet yesterday, researching a range of topics I needed information on, I began to wonder what had happened to the world wide web. If I knew exactly what I wanted (e.g. the Qantas website or a particular university course), I came up with the right website in a minute or less. However, if I was looking for information, rather than a site, what I discovered was a huge range of sites that were useless. That didn't respond to my search terms. That redirected me to other sites that were irrelevant. What has happened? Is it Google? Should I start using another search engine?

I remember around seven years ago when I was doing historical research on pirates in the Caribbean (pre the movies). There were plenty of sites, many with a lot of information on them, and my main task was to work out which ones were accurate. There are a lot of people with pirate sites! Usually any sites based at a university or historical research facility or government history facility were good, and gave me not only a wealth of information but lists of further references to pursue.

What do we get now? For a start, Wikipedia. I have nothing against it, but it's really only a starting point (not always accurate) for further, deeper research. What I am finding is that the truly useful sites are now buried under a hundred other sites that try to offer me merchandise or other rubbish, or that have used my keywords in some kind of cunning way to get me to their site, no matter what my real search is about.

I've also found that even refining search terms to be as accurate as possible doesn't work. One search I did was to try to find a cheap or reasonable-cost hotel in a particular area of a large city. I estimated that 70% of the sites that came up on the first two pages of Google were for hotels that were either way outside the area I specified or were way too expensive. This happened with a couple of other searches I did for different things.

The other thing I have found is a paucity of material. Yes, I know that website analysts are pounding into our heads that sites need to have short bursts of information that are readable on screen. That might work for a recipe or tourist site, but if I am researching, for example, the first cars in Australia and what they were and what they looked like and who owned them and who made them, one paragraph was hopeless - and that was on the museum website.

Has the internet finally got to a point where, if you want quality and quantity of information, it is useless to us? Have the merchandisers (i.e. anyone who wants to sell us something via the net) finally made the internet so cluttered that it's no use at all if you are doing real research? What do you think? (What I think is thank goodness for books and libraries! That's where I'm heading tomorrow.)

Reading by the Fire

No, not this week. This week in Melbourne we are reading IN the fire, that's if we can concentrate in this horrible, awful heat. It's easier just to lie in front of the air conditioner and spray yourself with water. For me, it's even too hot to go to the beach. Who wants to fry on the sand? So reading becomes an activity that is something you do when your brain doesn't feel like thick, hot mud!

Writing becomes even harder to manage. Computers overheat, for a start. I've lost my internet connection a couple of times because somewhere in the house, or outside it, the cable has gone pfftt and nothing works. The router gets so hot that it goes off too. I have been only turning the computer on when I need to do something. Two nights ago, when I had to email off two things due on deadlines, and my internet connection died, I was beside myself. But that was also heat-stress! I did eventually send things a few hours later.

I have even been grateful to go to work this week, or I was, until the air conditioning there conked out!! Still, amongst all the sweat and sticky chairs and iced water, I have been editing. Somehow, pages on my lap, one sentence at a time, pen in hand, I can focus enough to delete and amend. And later at night, when I can bear the heat of the laptop, I transfer edits into the manuscript. I am one chapter from finishing the edits, three chapters from transferring to the ms. And then the revision is done. For now.

I have already warned my agent, who will be the first to read this draft (my great writing friend K read a previous draft), that this is something different from me. More serious, a bit more weird. I could hear the nervousness in his voice! But this was one of those books I had to write, one that I had been wanting to try for a couple of years. The first attempt went nowhere because I tried to "nice-fy" it, which resulted in a bland yuck. Now it's done the way I want. We'll see what the response is!