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Happy New Year

© Caroline Baker

The end of the year has come again. It's time to bid 2002 goodbye. The year passed quickly and almost quietly compared to that of 2001. Much of that had to do with all the changes post 9/11. This year, many seemed reserved, waiting and watching. The changes in the state of the economy did not help either. What was already turmoil from the collapse of the dotcoms became even worse with scandals like Enron and other large corporations. It seemed there was no end to all the bad news.

But the end is here.

2003 is within view. And with the new year comes the chance and hope that things will changes and improve. The Internet has especially seen a time of quietness. It seems that the status quo was okay for everyone. Most companies dealing directly with the Internet or technology were just hanging on in 2002, hoping to survive the storm. As we approach 2003, their attitudes have not changed.

But change is needed. The Internet is a hodgepodge of information and misinformation. I was reminded of this more blatantly when searching for a good rum cake recipe for my husband. We found several, the one we finally settled on coming from, of all places, RumCakeRecipe.com.

To find this site, we searched for over 3 hours. We started with the standard Google search, typing in "rum cake recipe". The Internet returned over 34,000 results that in some algorithmic way matched what was typed in. Some results were dead on. But then there were others where we went to a rum distributor or found out about how to order a coffee cake.

If that was not bad enough, visiting some of the recipe sites resulted in instructions such as this:

Pour out a glass of rum. Set aside 10 cups of flour. Test rum. Sift flour. Test rum. Mix egg, flour and water until batter is smooth. Finish rum in cup. Pour yourself more rum.

The instructions literally stop there.

This type of misinformation is not uncommon on the Internet. At least in this case, it's obvious that this is someone's idea of comedy. Admittedly, my husband and I got a small chuckle out of reading it. But there are many cases on the Internet where the misinformation is not as a clear. Where it's hard to decipher fact from fiction. Where the fabrication is so crisp that it rings like truth.

There are no guard dogs to this information. In fact, most search engines are automated, relying on yet more strange algorithms to spider through sites and gather information. The key to search engine success from places such as Google, Yahoo, Lycos or any others is the sheer number, not content, of sites that they can find. While there is still some human pieces to it, a person perhaps categorizing those entries or occasionally removing dead links, there's still too much out there for anyone to truly review.

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