Writing

To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "The Internet is big – really big – you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that’s just peanuts to the Internet."

Living in the media-savvy, digitised West, it's often easy to forget just how huge the Internet has become. Thanks to the billions of people browsing webpages around the world, the Internet now plays host to the largest collection of data flow in virtual space. Just clicking on Wikipedia's homepage statistics reveals that almost 10 million users have edited and posted over 2.5 million articles. That's trillions of words being pumped through the Internet every second.

Cultural anthropologist and media ecologist Michael Wesch calls this growing mass of online data "an information explosion, an information revolution… without material constraints [and where] everything is miscellaneous." But with so much arbitrary 'stuff' floating around cyberspace, how do we begin to organise, critique, and understand this information? And who is designing our data?

Search engines are one of the most obvious ways to organise information, and there's little doubt that over the past ten years Google has monopolised this market. But the last few months have seen a number of companies launch several variations of the search engine in a bid to topple Google's influence over Web data.

One of the most innovative solutions online at the moment is an 'answer engine' called Wolfram Alpha. Unlike a search engine, which matches search criteria and returns a list of relevant links containing potential answers, Wolfram Alpha gathers these potential answers and critiques them against a structured knowledge base. Type in the word 'design' for instance, and the answer engine returns a page showing the origin of the word and it's many definitions, alongside a network of synonyms and the word’s frequency in written and spoken English.

As with a search engine, Wolfram Alpha seeks out miscellaneous data on the Web, but by calculating answers contextually and relationally, the answer engine provides a meaningful method by which random data can be arranged and interpreted. Wolfram Alpha's grand long-term vision is to "provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

But what about Google, the worlds number one search engine? As ever, Google is forging ahead with the technology it pioneered and three weeks ago the search mogul launched Google Squared – a semantic search engine that extracts structured data across the web and presents its results in a spreadsheet of columns containing shared attributes. Much like Wolfram Alpha, Google’s aim is to "look for structures on the Web that seem to imply facts. Like something ‘is’ something."

Yet for all of Google and Wolfram Alpha's attempts to structure the way we treat data on the Web, information on the Web remains resolutely autonomous and messy for a reason; disorder allows data on the Web to exist simultaneously in multiple categories, browsing the Web works precisely because the Internet is unconstrained by one system of order.

Chaos is the Web's greatest asset and Google and Wolfram Alpha will need to work doubly hard if they are to truly make sense of what it means to 'search and find' in electronic disorder.