How much is too much?
UCSD Wants To Measure How Much Information There Is - In The Whole World. The summary article quotes “We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.”
So - if they’re aware of that, why are they trying to measure the immeasurable? How are they going to even define what to include or exclude? What can we actually do with the measurement once we have it - anything other than saying “Oh look it’s gone up x%”.
What we really need is to answer how to find good, useful, accurate information quickly. So far for me, Google is _still_ the easiest, quickest way most of the time, especially once you learn how to use it effectively. Use quotes “around phrases”, sticking a ‘-’ in front of words you want to exclude from the results, and using ~ in front of words which there’s multiple words with similar meaning that you’re interested in greatly improve your chances of finding what you’re after.
The results of searching for ‘post’ are very different to the results when searching for ‘post -”australia post” -”post office”‘ : Now the majority of the mail related results we’ve had removed and instead we’re getting other meanings of post in the results - relating to post production, power on self test, the Trading Post and so on. Another scenario: ‘~maize’ will return results referencing corn, and searching for ‘~corn’ returns results referencing maize and grain and so on.
Using just a mix of these three technique’s can help you get your results filtered so the information you’re actually interested in is there for you at the top of your results more often than not, and you’ll be a lot more efficient than people who just use plain keywords and end up drowning in irrelevant information.
I think spending time/resources on improving the ‘findability‘ of useful information would be much more beneficial. Remember - the goal is to increase the amount of your knowledge, not the amount of your information.
I think we’ll be waiting for the Semantic Web for a long time. (What will it be, Web 9.0?)
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