Web Dragons

PREFACE

In the eye-blink that has elapsed since the turn of the millennium, the lives of those of us who work with information have been utterly transformed. Much—most—perhaps even all—of what we need to know is on the World Wide Web; if not today, then tomorrow. The web is where society keeps the sum total of human knowledge. It’s where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. And what has made all this possible is not just the fantastic amount of information out there, it’s a fantastic new technology: search engines. Efficient and effective ways of searching through immense tracts of text is one of the most striking technical advances of the last decade. And today search engines do it for us. They ...