Category Archives: Search Engines

Does “cyberspace” still exist?

A food-for-thought/thinking-in-progress post: does “cyberspace” still exist? I’ve been thinking about this issue recently in connection with several law review articles I’m writing. My feeling at this point is that our earlier conception of networked communications at the dawn of “cyberspace” in 1996 (see Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace) is quite different from the […]

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Google abandons “minimalist” homepage, permits distracting background images. Yuk.

For everything but its core search engine, Google has been at the forefront of the participatory web, i.e., Web 2.0, with products like YouTube, Picasa, and more.  But its core search engine has for over a decade been sacrosanct, with a minimalist aesthetic: logo, search box, and a so-called 28-word rule that limits the words […]

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The hindsight of archives: “Popular Science” & incorrect technology predictions

Sci-fi and tech site IO9.com reports that Popular Science Magazine is now making its archives available online dating back to 1872.  The archives can be searched either at the magazine’s website or via Google Books.  In the archive, I was able to quickly find articles of historical interest, each showing a technological prediction that didn’t […]

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Is Zoetrope the next-gen Internet Archive?

Although the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a great research tool, its utility is hampered but a lack of basic search mechanisms.  One can search by URL and archived links, but basic Google-style boolean searching isn’t available.  The Archive once offered a beta boolean search tool, but it never worked and it was later withdrawn. […]

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