Web 3.0: Searching vs finding

I wish I had received the invitation from Twine when I was drafting the chapter on Infoxication 2.0 (although I do mention Twine, I was still waiting for their beta invite), because I truly think web 3.0 (or you name it, if we consider the number as the version for a decade, it works for me; i.e. web 2.0, from 2000 to 2010, web 3.0, from 2010 to 2020, and so on, so forth) is the way to re-focus on organization and information retrieval. Why re-focus? I think that cycles have always worked the same way: a first wave focused on developing that new media addressing old needs and reshaping future ones, a second wave focused on re-organizing and managing the information and or communication plethora wrought by the first wave. This happened with a technology called writing (and then we had to come up with something called libraries) and it’s now happening with web 2.0 and web 3.0. Web 2.0 is aimed at the front-end user. To me, it’s been a wave going outwards, outside the code itself, expanding the concept of what web should be, reaching new users (freeing us from the  shackles of computer know-how elite), connecting applications and intertwining code and content. And we all know the consequences, it’s been like the big bang of information and communication. Then, web 1.0 and web 2.0 concepts such as search engines and RSS are just falling behind. Web 3.0 is then the second stage of the wave, it goes inward again (and not precisely to the starting point of web 1.0 but to a different one), it focuses on the code again (without getting rid of gained valued brought by web 2.0) to make it better for content retrieval purposes (the semantics of web 2.0 tagging and multimedia resources). Web 3.0 is a metaweb approach, IMHO completely necessary.

Why? Well, has anyone realized that nothing is left to chance? Why have we called search engines ‘SEARCH’ engines? Because that’s what they do: search. I hope web 3.0 substitutes search engines by find engines: finders instead of searchers. There’s a huge semantic difference between those concepts: searching is centrifugal and finding is centripetal. Whereas search piles up, find isolates.

And that helps.

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