pittfalls on the Internet

Spam is a problem. And it will ever increase as long as we continue using the current technology. Whenever you type in your email address on a not encrypted webform, and spammer can capture it. In the near future they will probably find ways to capture email addresses straight from email messages travelling across the Internet. Finally spam will kill itself, at the very same moment as it kills the possible serious use of email. Publishers of newspapers, magazines, any printed matter, know that their readers only accept a certain amount of advertisements. Spammers seem to be ignorant of that fact.

The good news is that currently programmers are already trying to write software that will allow us to communicate over the Internet in a similar way as email but much safer.

The world wide web seems to have an even much bigger problem luring around the corner. There is an awful lot of very useful information out there. Many people have produced an infinite number of links pages to guide us to those pages that we're looking for. But links change and websites can suddenly disappear. By my personal experience most links pages were very reliable in 1997, their webmasters did their upmost to check that they only provided live links. Currently (2006) most links pages themselves are abandoned by their creators, they link only to dead or outdated pages. Most of these webmasters no longer have the same email address or they've even lost their password, so they're not even able to update the information.

There's a lot of dead and outdated information on free webhost servers. But to my surprise I regularly find complete running websites from companies that no longer exist at all. Obviously nobody is paying the bill for the server hosting that site, why doesn't that host remove it to clean up harddisk space? Doen't anybody ever clean up domain name servers?

Perhaps you'd say "who needs links pages, use Google". Right, Google is (still) a very nice search engine. But it's starting to become a mess as well. It finds more and more abandoned sites with more and more outdated information. On the other hand more and more sites find ways to generate traffic to their site by getting their sites on top of Google search results on more or less random keywords. I never understand why they do this, when I'm trying to get information about bikes, why would they trick me into visiting a site about car stereo's?


A relatively new phenomenon are the typo sites. It's only natural that when millions of people access microsoft.com, every now and then someone will type in mircosoft.com. In this case, at this moment it gives a "server not found" error. But in lots of similar cases you'll find yourself on a site with misleading information.

All these symptoms and several more lead to the conclusion: as long as the Internet has no cleaning mechanism it will become harder and harder to find what we're looking for.