1 Google
Google is still to me - and millions of others - a daily miracle. If the internet only consisted of this ultra-fast search engine (Google) it would have justified its existence many times over. You can type in (almost) anything, however obscure, into the space provided and - literally - in a fraction of a second it has come up with hundreds, if not thousands, of references. If knowledge is power, then Google commands the gateway.
It claims access to 3bn web documents - a total that is rising even as you read this. As a result of recent improvements, it can now search picture libraries and 20 years of usenet news groups. The ancient Library of Alexandria had 40,000 volumes - a fact uncovered, of course, through a Google search lasting 0.11 seconds.
It is still all too easy to get blasé about what the web can do - witness the numbers of people who moan about having to wait seconds for getting information that 10 years ago would have taken days. Even so, Google stands apart from the hundreds of rival search engines that have sprouted across the web. It may be ousted, just as it saw off rival search engines such as AltaVista, but it can not get much faster than it is without becoming a super-charged Hawking engine searching in negative time.
I gave Google a few quick tests while writing this. It came up with a picture of Manet's Olympia in 0.23 seconds and in reply to a search for E=MC2 it emerged with, among other things, a recording of Einstein himself explaining the equivalence of energy and matter. I then asked for the most obscure word I could remember, honorificabilitudinatibus, the mock Latin word from Love's Labour Lost that contains an anagram supposedly proving that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. This time there was only one reference, but it took 0.18 seconds, less time than it takes to pronounce the word. In case you think I have exhausted the superlatives, hang on. It is also extremely easy to learn. When I demonstrate it to technophobic friends (and colleagues!) I usually say it will take 45 seconds from a sitting position. But this is only because I like to leave a margin of error. It normally takes less than 15 seconds, depending on how fast they type.
Some people complain that such search engines create information overload, but that is silly. The overload of information exists anyway. Search engines such as Google merely tell you what is there. And the more specific you are in describing what you want, the less superfluous will be the material you receive. It is the solution to overload, not the problem. And the downside to Google? I'll need notice of that question.
Victor Keegan
2 Yahoo!
Yahoo (Yahoo) was the first wonder of the web, and in many respects, it still is. It started in January 1994 when two Californian graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, starting compiling a database of links, mainly for their personal use. But well before the end of the year, it had become recognisable as the Yahoo we know today, and love.
In the past seven years, Yahoo has expanded its range enormously, partly through a long string of acquisitions. Yahoo now offers almost everything you could want: email, instant messaging, chat, clubs, photo albums, home web pages, file storage, shops, auctions, classified ads and more.
There are two interesting tensions in the way Yahoo operates. The first is that it has antithetical aims: it wants to send surfers away as quickly as possible, but also have them stick around as long as possible. The site's original function was to provide users with high quality links to other web sites. The better this works, the less time you spend on Yahoo. But as a regular visitor, of course, you may well be tempted to use the other services. You can spend hours doing your email, chatting, shopping, reading the news or listening to Yahoo Radio, all of which may involve receiving lots of banner ads.
The other tension is between Yahoo's image - based mainly on its homely beginnings - and the corporate reality. Yahoo is not run by amateurs: it is a big, rich, aggressive multinational corporate. If someone has a good idea on the web - a site that keeps your pictures, coordinates party invitations, provides advice or whatever - then pretty soon there is a Yahoo version too. It is possible to compete against Yahoo, but it is not easy. Like Microsoft in the software business, it is big enough to buy you or bury you.
If Yahoo faces a serious threat, it is an internal one. The site's homely image is reinforced by the design, which looks like a jumble of text. This is extremely effective: you can find what you want easily, and pages download really quickly. But eventually some idiot of a manager is going to let some brain dead web designer make it "look better", and it will become a standard corporate web site. When that happens, Yahoo will start to decline.
But it will long be remembered for doing what it did best: make the web's growing array of resources easily accessible to ordinary people.
Jack Schofield
3 Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) isn't the simplest thing on the web. But there is something generous, eclectic and all-embracing about it, an attempt to get out-of-copyright books to people who might really want to use them. The idea is all-embracing, but the achievement is not.
Authors under the letter K, for instance, include one poem from John Keats (Lamia) but just about everything from Kipling. You can check Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech and the inauguration address of John F Kennedy. I went looking for (and found) Kinglake's Eothen and got lost in an unexpected wealth of Charles Kingsley.
The letter P plays host not just to Thomas ("The rights of man") Paine but also Albert Bigelow Paine, who wrote a comprehensive biography of Mark Twain, the essays of Walter Pater and the poems of Banjo Patterson, the annotated diaries of Samuel Pepys, the Mayflower Compact of the Pilgrim fathers, the letters of Pliny the Younger.
"The Project Gutenberg etexts should be so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them..." says the Gutenberg Philosophy. Most of the books are in the public domain, and if you think the selection is haphazard, that too is one of the project's joys.
The books are converted into etexts and archived by volunteers. This is a cyberlandscape compiled by old-fashioned bookmen, and bookmen have their quirks. I had planned to see in there an author called Quirk, but by that time, the site had seized up altogether, as if by crabbed old age. But then, how many web projects can claim to have been started in 1971?
Tim Radford
4 Multimap
Once we were lost, now we are found - or at least have a little printed-out hint on the dashboard. The advent of Multimap (Multimap) has transformed the lives of those of us who have to get anywhere to a deadline.
Now, instead of acquiring (or finding) an A-Z or local guidebook, or even having to ask a human being every time we have to go somewhere new, we can interrogate multimap.com and get a map of the locale. Then it is simply a case of printing it off (with a range of magnifications to help with motorway junctions or nearby stations). There are other mapping services - Streetmap (www.steetmap.co.uk) remains a fast way to find London streets. But Multimap wins because of the breadth of its services, speed and easy navigation. Multimap even makes it easy to look beyond these shores, with maps of the wider world available too - it is truly a web-powered lighthouse to the world.
Neil McIntosh
5 Ebay
Ebay (Ebay), which conducts online auctions, is the most impressive large internet company. This is because it is providing a service millions find useful that didn't happen before the web was invented, and which could not exist without the web.
Ebay has opened up a global market place in which people from China, San Francisco, Moscow or Scunthorpe can bid against each other for products (new and old) put up for auction by someone in Durban.
The tiniest of small businesses can suddenly find a global market for their products by putting them into Ebay for auction. Customers rate the people who have been selling to them according to their reliability, so building up a track record reducing, if not eliminating, the scope for fraud.
Ebay is good because it is an enabler. Although it is in business to make money (moderately succesfully so far) it does it by enabling others to make money too. Definitely worth much more than the sum of its parts.
Victor Keegan
6 Amazon
One day, talking on the phone to a webbed friend, I raved about a book I'd read. "That sounds good," he said, tapping away. "I've just ordered it." And that is the beauty of Amazon (Amazon). For regular users, it has made itself the shortest possible path between wanting and buying.
Maybe you could get something cheaper, and perhaps you could get it quicker, but probably not by much. Could you get it easier? I doubt it. The pages are fast and not overloaded with graphics. The search engine and one-click ordering system let you find and order something in seconds, and buy. But this is not the whole story. Amazon also uses technology very cleverly to inform you, to keep you on the site, and to tempt you to buy more stuff. Like this book? Here are another three you might like. Why not read what other users say about them? You can always add them to your wish list. Oh, and people who bought this book also bought these....
In sum, Amazon does not simply automate the physical process of buying a book, it makes it into a new and different experience. It even pioneered the use of associates, kicking back a small percentage to websites that urged their readers to buy from Amazon.
It now even owns the Internet Movie Database (Imdb). IMDB is one of the wonders of the web on its own. Its database includes information on more than a quarter of a million film and television productions made since 1892, almost half a million actors and actresses, 50,000 directors, pictures, film awards, quotes, trivia, user ratings and more.
And when you've read about, say, Claude Faraldo's Themroc (1972), one click on the UK/VHS button takes you to the Themroc page at Amazon where (if you are already signed in) another click orders it.
Jack Schofield
7 Blogger
Few websites can claim to have radically changed the face of the wider web. Blogger is one site that has managed that.
By offering a simple route to "push-button publishing for the people" Blogger has given birth to a generation of weblogs, or blogs, which simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. Along the way, it has helped make the world wide web a vastly more interesting place.
A few years ago, home pages were almost universally dull, because creating them was a fiddle that made it just too tempting to post and forget. Most became sleepy relics.
Then came Blogger and, suddenly, it was easy to create a dynamic, constantly changing website. The creative talents of people who otherwise couldn't be bothered with web authoring were set loose.
Adding a new entry to your online journal can take just seconds, takes little or no technical knowledge and is published - as it promises on the front page - at the push of a button. Evan Williams, one of its founders, is a contributor to the End of Free weblog (Endoffree) which suggests that one day we will have to pay for Blogger's usefulness. But, with new functionality being promised for the New Year, us regular users would happily stump up.
Neil McIntosh
CREDIT: Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment