The Internet is not a library. The library metaphor presupposes so many thingsâa central source for resource information, a paid staff dutifully indexing new material as it comes in, a well-understood and rigorously adhered-to ontologyâthat trying to think of the Internet as a library can be misleading.
Letâs take a moment to dispel some of these myths right up front.
Googleâs index is a snapshot of all that there is online. No search engineânot even Googleâknows everything. Thereâs simply too much and its all flowing too fast to keep up. Then thereâs the content Google notices but chooses not to index at all: movies, audio, Flash animations, and innumerable specialty data formats.
Everything on the Web is credible. Itâs not. There are things on the Internet that are biased, distorted, or just plain wrongâwhether intentional or not. Visit the Urban Legends Reference Pages (http://www.snopes.com/) for a taste of the kinds of urban legends and other misinformation making the rounds of the Internet.
Content filtering will protect you from offensive material. While Googleâs optional content filtering is good, itâs certainly not perfect. You may well come across an offending item among your search results.
Googleâs index is a static snapshot of the Web. It simply cannot be so. The index, as with the Web, is always in flux. A perpetual stream of spiders deliver new-found pages, note changes, and inform of pages now gone. And the Google methodology itself changes as its designers and maintainers learn. Donât get into a rut of searching a particular way; to do so is to deprive yourself of the benefit of Googleâs evolution.
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