Do you remember-- only seven or eight years ago-- how clunky and difficult it used to be to do an Internet search? To get quick but useful results back then one had to use Booleaan logic terms as a matter of course. And if you were like me, when you found a good source you not only bookmarked it, you backed it up to a floppy disk. Once upon a time searching the Internet was so frustratingly time consuming that a friend of mine used to make a good living doing searches for businesses.

I was musing about that because I heard on the radio the other day a financial advisor warn against buying shares in Google. (It is overvalued, according to him).

This in turn led me to wonder how historians and cultural anthroplogists of the future will search the records of the Internet from the late 20th and early 21st century. Weeding out the billions and billions of bits of clutter would be an imposible task for us wet ware types.

It seems to me only Artificial Intelligence could do the job...

Imagine this scenario:

Reuters
May 1, 2505
CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER ANCIENT STORAGE DISCS

In a news conference today Bob Bauval XVIII of the Ancient Internet Project announced the discovery of a hoard of data storage discs. The discs, called by scholars the Hall of Maat Backup Discs, were discovered in a previously unexcavated section of the now famous EES site (Egyptian Exploration Society).

"This is an important find," Bauval said. "We knew from other ancient texts the Hall of Maat Backup Discs once existed. These people were almost phobic about what they called 'Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure', but until now our AI units were only able to infer what the discs may have contained."

The Hall of Maat society was an Internet cult that flourished in the early 21st century. There has been much speculation that luminaries such as Mercury Rapids, Jimi Hendrix, and Bill & Ted were members.

The information on the disks is of course degraded and would be unreadable under normal circumstances, but Bauval said AI units have assured him they can recover the texts.

"Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure this information was saved for posterity", Bauval said.

The discs were stored in a box hidden under the 314th tile of a toilet archaeologists call 'Anthony's Bathroom'. The top of the box is inscribed in ancient chemical characters which read, Property of John Wall. nuff said (c).

t.