Google can’t see me
Some recent incidents with bizarre, inflammatory comments over at burdell.org have made me think about the visibility of web pages. Google has made great strides in reducing the toil of sifting through piles of irrelevant web pages in an effort to find what you want, but the ambiguity of language and the imperfections inherent in making a computer think mean that there will always be some element of a surreal experience in which the Web leads you down a path you never imagined when all you wanted was to learn how to typeset a document. The comments at burdell.org appeared to have been made by people searching for something not all related to blogs or whatever else David does, but certain posts were found that either complained about something out in that wide world of ours, and, with the recent addition of comment capabilities to posts, people have arrived and scribbled their angry thoughts wherever a surface was to be found. I am no stranger to angry or offensive journal entries, but I have neither the desire nor ability to add inline comments to these posts, and, though this glog is clearly linked from a web page that can easily found by mistake from searches for web design help or mac and cheese recipes, the glog itself—hosted, as it is, on obsolete technology—is not indexed by google or other major search engines. By deciding to take no more of markup languages, I’ve effectively hidden myself from the world.
I could have these pages indexed if I wanted, of course. There is an HTTP gateway that I tossed together after repeated complaints that gopher is inaccessible with modern software, and I’d only need to offer a link to this and see myself once more available to confuse others’ Internet experiences. What I wonder, though, is would this result in angry letters? In the entire history of gophernet.org, I’ve received only one complaint, from someone who shared my name, and it wasn’t so much a complaint as a half-joking plea to quit making fun of Canada so very much. One. No demands, no death threats, no livid wavers of arms. I would like to receive more angry email, since I find such things hilarious, but it would seem that the time needed to switch gears, the act of retreating to one’s own haunts and software in order to compose an email, perhaps even requiring a quick step off of the Web, is just too much. It’s a pity.