Dick Pountain/13:45/04 April 1996
Many, many years ago when I was a teenager I was for a while addicted to science fiction. One short story that stuck indelibly in my memory concerns a future time when all the computers in the known universe have been connected together and some VIPs are invited to sit at the console and type in the first question, which is (with numbing predictability) "Is there a God?". A huge electric arc flashes across the room and fuses the OFF switch into the open position, and a mighty voice booms out "There is now!"
I couldn't remember who wrote this slightly preposterous story but Liam, Pro's resident SF guru, tells me it was "The Answer" by Fredric Brown. I was reminded of just now, while reading about the staggering events that are currently occuring around the World Wide Web, of which you can read more in John Honeyball's column elsewhere in this issue. The implications of Microsoft's strategic about-face are profound - it more or less elevates the Web to the status of being our next operating system - and be assured that I shall have more to say about them in future columns. But my immediate reaction to the news was to remember that old story, and to ruminate on the fact that the Web will pretty soon connect just about every computer on the planet, so perhaps now is a good time to try the experiment.
I wound up Netscape, aimed it at Alta Vista and solemnly typed in the fateful question, "Is there a God?" Alta Vista found 1,528,818 occurrences of the word God and presented me with the first batch from the 200,000 hits it considered worth retrieving. I checked out the first twenty or so items, and the least tedious of them include these:
"God Damn! You all must be whiz kidz 'n' shit!"
Believe in God or Go To Hell. Last Modified: 12/18/94.
God's Geek Code. GAT d++ H+ s+++: !g !p !au a? w !v C U?++++ P+ L- 3- E--
N+(++) K++++ !W M-- !V -po+ Y t- 5- jx R- G'''' tv b D-- B- e*
u* h* f* !r n+ z?
Var god och använd Netscape 1.1 eller senare för högsta nöje.
APOLLO: NOT THE GOD, THE PARROT...
Perhaps you're waiting for me to knit these messages together into something of deeper significance, in which case please don't hold your breath. If I were a clinical psychiatrist I'd be tempted to describe the overall effect as 'word salad'. If this is a new God, then the bad news is that He, She or It is suffering from advanced hebephrenia. I don't know if Fredric Brown is still alive, but if he is then my guess is that he'd be more than somewhat disappointed by this result.
In just forty years Brown's portentous vision has degenerated into something almost entirely banal. How exactly did we do that? Well, let's start with what I was talking about in last month's column - access to the Web is effectively free, which means that demand for space on it is almost limitless, while at the same time there is no quality control of any kind. Don't get me wrong; I'm not in favour of censoring the Web, nor do I begrudge Apollo the Parrot his few kilobytes of fame. I couldn't in all conscience believe such things, as someone who was deeply involved in the underground press in the 60's when scribblings every bit as whacky as this lot were propagated on cheap paper every week. The difference between then and now though is that this new electronic means of distribution imposes no structure at all, and no categorisation. Back in the '60s, stoned ramblings about UFOs were not, by and large, found in the middle of the Financial Times, the Lancet or the Glasgow Telephone Directory. On the Web everything is just pitched in together, orchids and onions, pearls and swine, yielding an average information density that approaches zero.
The Web was originally invented to serve as groupware for scientists at CERN who needed to share documents with a lot of graphical content, and when you use it in such a focussed way it's a superb communication tool. For example, at my other home, Byte magazine, we're using the Web to implement a Virtual Press Room to which companies are now requested to send their press releases. We get a short summary of the week's new releases via email and anyone who's using the Netscape mail reader on a POP3 account can click on the URLs contained in this message and jump straight into the original release if they're interested.
However the Web is very poorly suited to becoming a receptacle for all the world's knowledge, which is how some people see it developing. To produce the Alta Vista index that I searched took the enormous computing power of 10 DEC Alpha chips running in parallel in 6 Gigabytes of memory, working continuously to index 2.5 million pages a day (out of 50 million, doubling every year.) The diffuse, massively connected network structure of the Web is not conducive to finding anything if you don't already know where it is, and it requires those who would index it to endlessly traverse the whole mess - like painting the Forth Bridge.
If you had to design a world-wide distributed database from scratch you wouldn't base it on HTML links but on some sort of hierarchical scheme where all pages get indexed locally at the time they are uploaded or updated, and these indexes get automatically consolidated back up to street, city and country level. Nevertheless the Web is all we have, so maybe we'd better find a way to use it more effectively - after all another meaning of web is something that ensnares or entangles.
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