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Sunday, October 2, 2022
This post is a collection of quotes from Dmitri Breteton in a blog post titled To Organize The World's Information in 2021. I recommend reading the blog post at this link. There are 4 quotes listed below chronologically.
1. "...there were the directories and portals like Jerry and David's guide to the web which later became Yahoo. These directories were lists of hierarchical categories. You could select a category like 'Science', then a subcategory like 'Physics' and get all the websites that talked about physics... This was much like a library."
2. "An encyclopedia is an attempt to summarize all knowledge. It is focused on giving factual explanations and descriptions of various things. It doesn't go too in depth, and it doesn't allow for opinion."
3. "We wanted to find all the blogs that talked about the American Revolution. Google told us they had 148,000,000 results, but only showed us 410. Half of those had nothing to do with the American Revolution, some were from the same website, and not all of them were even blogs. What is going on here?"
4. "When Google rose and all the web directories fell, we lost the metaphor of the library. We lost the ability to explore blogs on various subjects with no real goal."