Beyond critical mass.
It may simply be a case of having much too much to chew, of trying to chew so
much that we can't digest what we take into our mouths. We might say that it's
sort of lost its bite. In late September of
2005 (when the magic number was somewhere substantially above 8,000,000,000)
Google decided that it would stop telling us how many pages it indexed. (As of
this writing, a Google search on the word "and" brings up 8 billion,
400 million hits. A similar Yahoo! search only gets to 7 billion, 800 million,
meaning, perhaps ...) It's not hard to realize that
with so many possible pages to be linked to, we're not about to analyze what sort
of relationships those links are intended to express. Were we to ask WHY a link
is there, or WHERE it will lead me, or WHAT underlies the placement or creation
of a particular link, we'd probably find ourselves paralyzed with indecision.
Who has the time for all this?
Go
to: The incredible shrinking directory, or
Go
to: Dr. Hierarchy and Mr. Associative