Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 19:04:09 -0400
From: Kafka Dreams 
To: void
Subject: search engine sorrows


Sometimes the net is this amazing thing, a tremendous interlocking
mesh of information - trivial to global, preferential to objective,
pious to crass, joyous to hateful - and it gives a profound sense of
being CONNECTED when you craft just the right question to ask the
right tool and the right answers unfold before you.

It leaves you feeling appreciative of the many varied flavors of the
electronic world.

But other times, you get nothing but broken DNS, out-of-business
Internet Service Providers, sluggish and bloated web pages full of
blinking graphics and overloaded meta tags trying to coax you or force
you or trick you into places you never intended, to see things
unappetizing and unrelated to your search.  Perhaps someone has not
yet managed to put together some way to group or search a subset, a
category of chaos, leaving you to sift through over forty-thousand
sites.  Or it has been and gone again, lost to a hole in bind or a
break-in that no one could afford to fix or a peering agreement that
died a miserable death due to unbalanced traffic.  Or the search
engines have not found it yet.  Or it is too obscure to be found
through known or even creatively applied means.

And it leaves you thinking "this SUCKS, dude" or some equally
uncultured idiom, and the beauty of the machines, the machines of
loving grace, are all but forgotten.

(In case you are wondering, I am trying to figure out what type of
music - some kind of Latin music, but I do not know any more specific
a category than that - is very upbeat, with a big brass section, lots
of drums, and often uses those old style police whistles.  I think it
might be something originally from Brazil, but I am not sure.  Anyway,
I cannot find it, nor can I find something that discusses various
types of Latin music in enough detail for me to recognize this
particular style.  I almost had it, with a link to a library of sounds
of lots of different types of Latin music, but the link is long dead.
I am being reminded that not EVERYTHING is on the net.  Quite
aggravating.  This and a book of poems - I do not know the title, the
date, nor any authors' names - written by teenagers who committed
suicide are my two biggest failures in this arena.)

Kelly J.