When I had to do research in high school in the 80s, I was reliant on dated encyclopedias and other research materials which was at best 10 years old, and at most, woefully under performing and useless. Skipping forward to university, I was able to do a little better with the use of the NovaNet which linked libraries on the old internet (before web though) in a limited capacity to browse article synopsis which were the main use of my material. Looking them on the black and green monitors and printing off the abstract on dot matrix printers was better than waiting for weeks for an article to be brought in. Even then using the in place CD-ROMs to search for an article in the stack of the library which might help me took about an hour or so just to search, find and see if it was what I wanted.
Today we take the idea of finding information at the tips of a mouse or finger, for granted. Search on the web has changed a lot since the early days – I remember that Lycos in 1995 proudly announced they had indexed 77 million web pages (not sites but pages). Now the number is many many fold of that on Google. Yes there is a lot of bad material when wanting to find something, but there is more good that comes about when searching. This has a lot to do with how sites are being built smarter and more effective with regard to SEO. Rather optimized to the search engines.
With the two big hitters of Bing and Google, you should be able to find what you want. If they dont have it, chances are it is not going to be available to you. Now social media is also helping by allowing us to like tweet and share links and material of interest to those who like siminlar ideas. Think Pinterest. Hey that is a great idea for a Christmas ornament – thanks for the post of the photo. Think I will share that. etc. etc.
Below is an infographic I came across on the background of search with respect to the web. The time has seemed short, but then thinking back only a few years so much is changing every day.
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