Too Fast for Me

Does google.com still offer the best search results?  Is bing.com surpassing the almighty Google? (ok so Bing is the almighty Microsoft, but it's still the underdog)  Should we now only put one space after a closing sentence punctuation?  Whoa the questions I ask and then read about.  FYI, google.com's search results are being spammed up like Yahoo's became.  Is Google the next Yahoo? Is bing.com the next google.com? Should I put one space or two after this sentence? Who knows?

I was around for the birth of the wide variety type of internet.  I remember being amazed by the vast amounts of information that I could get from the web.  I remember printing out hundreds of pages on race vehicle dynamics from a site that had diagrams, formulas, small pictures, stories, and examples, worried that the site might disappear  the next week like many sites I had found previously had seemed to do. I remember going from 12.4(?) to 28.8 to 56.6k speeds and being astounded by what the increased bandwidth could do, let alone the speed when trailrunnings work installed a ISDN line into our home. WOW!!!  So its with a little reluctance that I see the relevance of websites, and all the info contained there in, being relegated to a 2nd class structure of information delivery. First personal blogs, then Facebook, and now Twitter have become the defacto(sp?) delivery "device" for information. I'm not dissing, as it were, on Facebook and Twitter, but I do quietly long for the days of more than 140 character information streams. Many interesting bloggers are getting bored and reducing their posts, while their readers are now checking on so and so's Facebook/Tweet status. Oh well, it must mean I'm getting old.

What do these two paragraphs have in common you may ask? Well, its the speed of change. I have gone from researching junior high class reports with the use of a paper encyclopedia, to having the worlds information at my fingertips. I have seen the substitution of two spaces after a sentence to only one space. And the search giant who defined a new generation of internet info gathering, has now become the hunted whale, still formidable, still swimming, still destroying Ahab's boat, but now with a few spears piercing its skin and a new boat closing in. I have more to say, but you probably didn't get past the first 140 characters. :)