First and foremost, I've been getting a little lengthy in my posts. I think I'd rather not make you read a book each time I post, so I'm trying to implement a new strategy. Keep 'em short, but keep 'em coming more frequently.
Now, to make a quick transition to my point, I thought I'd share a cool idea I discovered: The Internet Archive. Its pretty straight forward - one problem with searching the web right now is that you only search through the latest version of the page that the search engine cached during its crawl, and of course you can only navigate to the current version. In most cases this works out fine, but wouldn't it be cool to have a time dimension to web searching as well. I think its a pretty good idea, BUT its still a few years before it becomes useful. I was trying to find out when Darrell Hammond from SNL came to UVA to figure out if Sarah came with me to see him or not (I could see if it occurred during our "break" period...just kidding Sarah). I thought it would be really cool if I could win this argument (Sarah claims she didn't think he was funny, I'm not so sure she was even with me) using the Internet, and I came upon the Internet Archive. It seemed like the perfect way to answer my question: this is information that wouldn't be on the web now but would be before the actual event happened. The problem is you can't just add a date range in addition to the key words of the search, you have to know the URL you're looking for and that proved cumbersome. In the end, I didn't necessarily win the argument, although I bought tix to see him when he comes through Denver anyway. My advice is check out the Internet Archive, remember it, and come back in 3 years when its combined with Google -- it will be awesome.
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