From a purely informational standpoint, the internet is the most incredible thing that ever came around.

I don't think anything gets deleted from CR4..................but a lot of it is conversational, and like all conversations, they just fizzle out at some point. As far as pertinent information on a particular topic, the search feature works great.

The conversations are never really over, just suspended. I'm subscribed to over 2000 threads...............once in a while someone will get an old one going again and I'll jump back in.

That is true, but will there be a theoretical or practical end to the info accumulated. Can we reach some sort of threshold?

As long as we're alive, whether it's on CR4 or somewhere else, no it will never end.

yes, but I feel that some sort of equilibrium can be reached, when the rate of info input = rate of removal (discarding) i.e. we can not add any more to cause an overwhelming feeling. Perhaps a line of research for hobbyists!

Well, there's plenty of human generated garbage. Fortunately it's in bits and bytes. The planet is safe from it and we can keep piling it up until the end of time.

I do my part by using that little trash can on my desk top about once a week.

The bottom line is...............it's way easier to build more servers/storage capacity than it is to sift through the information.

One of the major issues I have with the Internet is that it is getting harder and harder to find the information I am looking for. Part of the problem is, of course, marketing types "gaming" the system to get their pages out front- resulting in one must shift through several pages of useless information before getting to the meat of the topic.

My estimation is that about 80% of the information on the Internet is noise- incoming signals that mask the signal one is trying to capture. Furthermore, a basic fact of life is that he whose position on any given topic is most tenuous will tend to shout louder than someone with a well-supported perspective (i.e., one finds far more "over unity" or "HHO" pages than realistic information on the limits of energy systems).

Another feature of information is that, in many endeavors, having a particular bit of information to which no one else has access gives one a decided advantage, which is the root of any "value" one can assign to any given piece of information. Once the information appears on the Internet, it is theoretically available to all, thereby decreasing its value.

So, it now costs MORE (in effort and time) to gather the inforamtion you are after, because there is so much noise blocking your access. Yet the information, now being in the hands of the multitudes, has decreasing value...

This does not sound like progress to me.

When the metaphysical weight of all those bits becomes large enough, there will be a meta-black hole that swallows them all up. Then everything will be forgotten, and a new universe will have to start all over.

There are many attributes about data in general, but the three that I think that you are mixing are persistence, relevance, and ranking.

Primarily thanks to Google, persistence (how long something is available) appears to be infinite since once indexed and cached their servers will never "forget" a piece of data no matter how trivial or inconsequential, unless removed by "the authorities".

Ranking has to do with how much interest there is in a particular piece of information, less interest the further back in a search the information will be, popular "things" tend to be closer to the front.

Relevance has to do with how closely the search results matches up with the perceived intent of the search. Both ranking and relevance help us sift through the mostly redundant and/or aged information.

Then there's the "gaming" that goes on where someone pays to have their information magically appear near the top of the list, we will just have to live with such distortions. Similarly there is much misinformation out there which will be persistent, with high ranking caused by constant accessing due to its relevance to like-minded searchers. Caveat emptor and consider the source when analyzing the results of your searches.

Yes, ram consult sums it up well with:"...persistence, relevance, and ranking." cwarner7_11 is also spot on when he says that we find it hard to extract the actual piece of info we need.

Quite often during web searches, we are bombarded with adverts or specially tweaked responses. This means that the real volume of the useful info is much less compared to the total volume of info. Consider what will happen say, 50 years from now: will this thread be stored somewhere on a server? Will it still be relevant, persistent or will it rank high if someone does a search for it?

It depends entirely on the content.
On here the average half life of a thread is about 3 or 4 days.
Some good 'uns last longer.
And some have to be put down by lethal injection... Poor poor Bath Breaking Thread
I run a blog about making bows (Bowyers Diary) it's been going for a couple of years now and the early posts are still being accessed, especially one which has how to make a handy tool described therein.
Del

Half life of hours for some threads even!!

As deep as sh*t gets on the internet..................at least I can read it in silence.

Could you imagine having a lyn in real life, pointing out every little screw up you ever made? {suicide emoticon}

Yeah, lyn. The guy that knows everything there is to know, and is the cofounder of a company that creates things that don't work.

Oh my! even if the content of the post is forgotten, Lyn surely will not! Lyn has a longer half-life that data!

Manufacturers often remove old, obsolete documents. Unless you have made a copy on your own computer, the info is lost to the web. Although, it probably resides on the manufacturer's own server archive, isolated from the web.

Eventually, seldom copied or used info will disappear but at a slower rate than new info coming on line. Of course, garbage proliferate even faster. I try to console myself by thinking that one person's garbage is somebody else's treasure...

That's one thing I wish was still around. I tend to keep equipment forever. Rebuild kits are cheap, but the specs are almost impossible to find.

I got a complete rebuild kit for a 13HP Honda engine for 60 bucks.............cylinders, pistons, rings, valves, seals.......... everything. The only reason I could put it together, is because someone in a shop, ran me off a copy of the factory service specs.............................before the internet came around.

Why do I get the feeling that they don't want us fixing stuff?

with information overflow, google (search engine) skills become more important.

But lots on the web is like the newspapers, read the interesting bits and discard the rest (then put the newspaper in the birdhouse/litter box/etcetera).

... about to run, but this came up in a quick search for "app." and "B.S. filter" search terms. And it's related to engineering to boot! Now how it applies to filtering Internet info. ... that's why I was searching for an app. There's gotta be an app., right? (Cut to the scene of the wicked witch melting, only saying, "I'm teching, I'm teching.")

..don't know about the relevance to the post!!!, but a great read all the same!

Yeah, I know. Your initial question, in my mind, naturally included B.S. as well as how "fresh" and accurate information is on the web. Thus, my including "B.S." and "filter" as search terms. B.S. is a special case of "inaccuracy." I just thought it a bit humorous that that search brought up a link having to do with engineering ideas. I was in a rush and if I had thought about it more would have likely checked the OT box. Sorry.

Others have addressed your question about the age of any document or discussion. I would add that it is less critical in discussions that aren't technical. So much information is outdated when published; i.e., textbooks are being outdated the day they are printed because research and new findings constantly modify some of the views and information expressed.

More generally, there is way too much "information" available to us these days. Redundancy is rampant. I've thought about this for quite some time.

Look at the bibliography of any book (if it has one) and you can't help thinking that all those books had information repeated or reframed for the book your holding. (How many common facts do all biographies of any person contain?) The question becomes, "Was the book sufficiently revolutionary that it warranted being published?" (Surely it did, if that is my trade/business!)

I've posted before about thoughts like that that occurred to me about libraries. It can be expanded to all knowledge. If we had ALL books digitized, to the point where the text could be recognized digitally, and then we had an algorithm good enough to parse it all, and THEN the same ideas or facts (??) filtered down to one complete instance or expression, how many pages would our tome (library of books) of truth now contain, compared to all the pages in all the books in our initial "source?"

It would be interesting if that, as well as the "master index" to it all, existed. So much time could be saved in learning. But what of literature? That would be a loss, to treat it the same way. Yet, how much paper has been used to give any individual who can get published, the opportunity to express the same basic themes of life -- love, love lost, good, vs. evil, the drama that ensues in all of it. How many movies are so unique that there wasn't one preceding it that would be sufficient for expressing "truths" about life and for our enjoyment. There is nothing unique in this post. At least it isn't wasting paper... I hope.

We do tend to be repetitive in our communications and knowledge transference/documentation. How many battlefield descriptions, for instance, contain so much redundant information? (From one book on the subject to another, of course.) How many undergraduate chemistry textbooks have 90% exactly the same information?

There is no way any of us could possibly read all the expressed information that exists. But if we distill it down to non-repetitive knowledge, it would certainly seem more manageable. I'm not suggesting any of us could still know it all. Hardly. But compared to all that has been written, it would be much less, I think. (Hm-m-m... I wonder if an ant colony's library would be more efficient? Or a bee hive's? For all of our intelligence, our species hasn't given much thought to efficiency.) Simplicity. We like it in so many ways, but like this post, we can't seem to maintain it. We are driven by emotion, which seems to be a large part of the culprit. Reflecting on what is, truly, important knowledge about life is helpful in this simplification process.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the human brain is the ultimate case of entropy?? Especially, if it was due to information overload!

No problem, your previous post still bring up an interesting line of thought.

Thanks for the great ideas/thought shared.Perhaps the study of the life of a document is a better study line, as discussions may not contain a high concentration of useful info per word used.

Now that you point it out, yes the references used to write one book can be anything from 50 to over a 100. If we used an Erdos number for each, surely we can converge at an origin (book) for generally any subject/topic written in any language on any topic at any time in the world!

Take organic chemistry for example. A text written in, say the 1980's may (and I am quite sure of this!) will be the original reference source for a huge number of following texts. The content will refer to the same, with a few adaptations, changes or examples.

Has man run out of genuine creative thinking? I would not be surprised if the brain is the ultimate case of entropy!