I'm an avid surfer, and browse through numerous sites a day. I spend a lot of time looking up things, and am overtly dependent on search engines. It just struck me as to how it would affect me, or a billion other people if search engines didn't exist. So here's a case study on a search done without a search engine.
Search Term: Trekking in India
Problem
Find out the web address for trekking agency(s) in India
Approach
I started doing what I would normally do if looking for an address in the real world: look in the phone directory, or in this case look into internet directories. By the way, please remember that you don't go looking for directories you have never heard of. I applied the same approach; I only knew of Google Directory and Dmoz, and thus I only searched on these sites
Results
- Google: The screen shots will tell you that I ended up with nothing
Home Page- Google Directory
Hiking Page
Dmoz: Failed again (Screenshot below)
Hiking Page (Similar page resulst as Google)
Inference
- If search crashes on the internet, we are lost (people might argue that this will never happen but I'm just exploring the hypothetical case that it does)
- Internet directories aren't the best. In fact they are unfriendly to a great extent and did not inspire a lot of confidence in me
- These directories are a repository of information as submitted by people, website omners etc. There is no validity or logic to all the data.
- Long live Google, Bing and all the other search engines. Simply cause if they crash, or cease to exist, the web would collapse.
- Search engines have made us dependent; dependent on them for even looking for the simplest things for which we earlier had another search engine called Friends' reference
- It does make sense distributing pamphlets with your web address on it
- It makes even better to give your web address out along with tissues :) (Visit Japan to experience this)