I remember working at the Collingwood VPL one sunny afternoon, when a plump, silver haired man with black spectacles came to me with a book. He was a coworker of mine and was very well read and eccentric. He always gave me advice on life and sometimes made me watery coffee for my morning break. What he said to me when he gave me the book was: “There’s a whole internet out there no one knows about.” He handed me the book (sadly I can’t remember the title), which addresses the issue of webpages not tracked by search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Has anyone ever tried finding a website without a search engine? What companies invest in having their content shown first on search engines and what falls out because of lack of tags/recognition?

Strangely, this conversation made me remember when I was little and the internet was still in its early phases. I would type in random phrases like “fungames.com” or “www.sailormoon.com” and it would lead me places. I’d have to be creative to think what to put there. It didn’t don on me as a young child that there was search engines until my teacher taught me in computer training in elementary. It totally changed my psyche and schema of typing things in freely as a child. (Sometimes it was horrid, because I’d come across pornographic material over seemingly innocent words … especially “fun”.)

It made me really think for a while of all the pages that fall out or don’t get enough recognition because of the influence of search engines. I remember the days before Wikipedia, I’d have to go through scores of pages to get information about my childhood fascinations: Digimon,  the Legend of Zelda, witchcraft, Aqua, etc. and nowdays the first hit I get is Wikipedia and Answers. Not that these dictionary/encyclopedias are bad, but when you put into perspective that nowadays when you type in “health” or “how to lose weight” or “fashion” or “technology”, these big names come up first that aren’t always the best first option – they can be superficial or downright scamming of your money.

This is something I cannot answer quite yet, but something I’d like to do more research on. I know ECU’s library has some readings on web/internet subject matter, but I’d really like to pursue some guru of the internet hidden somewhere in Vancouver. Or, if I can’t do that, at least track down the man at Collingwood and find out what that book was. It still makes me think, even up to today in class when we spoke about the internet.