1.2 What Google Isn't
The Internet is not a library. The library metaphor presupposes so
many things—a central source for resource information, a paid
staff dutifully indexing new material as it comes in, a
well-understood and rigorously adhered-to ontology—that trying
to think of the Internet as a library can be misleading.
Let's take a moment to dispel some of these
myths
right up front.
Google's index is a snapshot of all that there is
online. No search engine—not even Google—knows
everything. There's simply too much and its all flowing too fast
to keep up. Then there's the content Google notices
but chooses not to index at all: movies, audio, Flash animations, and
innumerable specialty data formats.
Everything on the Web is credible. It's
not. There are things on the Internet that are biased, distorted, or just plain wrong—whether intentional or
not. Visit the Urban Legends Reference Pages (http://www.snopes.com/) for a taste of the
kinds of urban legends and other misinformation making the rounds of
the Internet.
Content filtering will protect you from offensive
material. While Google's optional content filtering is good,
it's certainly not perfect. You may well come across
an offending item among your search results.
Google's index is a static snapshot of the Web. It simply cannot be so. The index, as with the Web, is always in
flux. A perpetual stream of spiders deliver new-found pages, note
changes, and inform of pages now gone. And the Google methodology
itself changes as its designers and maintainers learn.
Don't get into a rut of searching a particular way;
to do so is to deprive yourself of the benefit of
Google's evolution.
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