Searching the World Wide Web: The Need for a Revolution. A recent review of a classic study on the origins of the printing press brought this sage commentary which might seem relevant to the challenges of the World Wide Web: “Ancient and Medieval scribes had faced tremendous difficulties in preserving the knowledge that they already possessed, which, despite their best efforts, inevitably grew more corrupted and fragmented over time. With the establishment of printing presses, accumulation of knowledge was for the first time possible. Rather than spending most of their energies searching for scattered manuscripts and copying them, scholars could now focus their efforts on revision of these texts and the gathering of new data” (Duffy). Anyone using the Web probably feels like the ancient scholar searching for any scrap of information they can find, with one exception – the Web searcher turns up thousands of links for every search and then has to sort through what must appear to be the most random of searching processes.

At first glance the ability to search the Web must seem reasonably straightforward. As one cyberculture legal specialist suggests, “The genius of the World Wide Web lies in its formatting language, called hypertext markup language (HTML), which permits users to move rapidly from one document to another. Each HTML document on the Web has a unique address that corresponds to the computer on which it is stored. If users know the address of a document that they wish to see, they can then access it by typing its address into their Web browser. Users can also move from document to document by "hyperlinking" to other Web material. Typically a hyperlink takes the form of highlighted text describing the contents of another document. If the viewer of one document wants to view the contents of the document described by the link, then she simply "clicks" on the hyperlink, which "transports" the user to the address of the desired document. Because of the tremendous amount of material published in HTML format, the Web now provides educators, students, professionals, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens with a powerful tool for the acquisition and dissemination of information. The Web promises to become the public library of the twenty-first century and threatens to make the shopping mall a thing of the past. More than any comparable communications innovation, the Web epitomizes the Information Age” (“Recent Developments”). However, this is a description relating to one document, assuming you have found or started with one, and it’s tracking from there to others. When you need to search through the entire Web, now encompassing billions of documents, the task becomes more daunting.

There is no alchemy involved in World Wide Web searching. There are category search engines (“These search engines allocate site entries to one of a set of predefined categories after a review by a human being, and thereby create a growing and structured database of manually reviewed sites”), general search engines (which “automatically scans the net for any site it can find”), and specialized search engines (providing “access to specific types of information, such as newsgroups, legal information, research information, and other specific categories of data.”) (“Types of Search Engines”). In fact, none of the search engines covers the entire Web; by one recent estimate the best any search engine does is to cover 56 percent of the Web, something over a billion pages (Sullivan). Being able to search a billion pages should seem like a godsend to most, but the uncertainty of what will be found in any given search and the lack of confidence one always has about whether the best sources have been found must always be a nagging concern.

That there would be difficulties in searching the Web can be seen in new efforts to map or visualize cyberspace, such as represented by the Atlas of Cyberspace (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html). It describes itself as “an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces. These maps of Cyberspaces - cybermaps - help us visualize and comprehend the new digital landscapes beyond our computer screen, in the wires of the global communications networks and vast online information resources. The cybermaps, like maps of the real world, help us navigate the new information landscapes, as well being objects of aesthetic interest. They have been created by 'cyber-explorers' of many different disciplines, and from all corners of the world.” This is a different kind of atlas than one normally sees in that visionary, conceptual, imaginative images are placed along side images of more realistic representations.

At the least, archivists and records managers need to develop some better means to develop searching tools to use on the World Wide Web. This could come through the development of new kinds of Web clearinghouses or via the development of services providing professional advice by expert records professionals. As some have argued persuasively, human agents play similar and often more critical roles as do intelligent software agents (Zick). But it is more complicated than even simple comparisons. There is a whole host of new and different actions needed to be considered by archivists and records managers when considering the World Wide Web.