Internet Overload

The task seemed simple: I was interested in finding out how long soil has been on our planet. So I opened up Yahoo and typed in "soil age."

Thirty seven million hits.

Now I don't know about you, but I really don't have the time to search through that many links. I mean, isn't that the point of a search engine? Aren't they supposed to cut out the crap and only return the most useful pages? Possibly my topic had been too broad, so I switched to "determining soil age," and got a more reasonable eight million hits. Right.

Maybe the problem was Yahoo, since a lot of people chide me for using it. So I typed in "soil formation" in Google.

Two million hits. By this point, I'm getting frustrated. I understand that computers don't have the discerning power that humans have, but anything more than two hundred links is beyond my limits of patience. At this point, I don't care if the technology accidentally cuts out the best link ever, since I won't find it in link 1,538,239 anyway, since I'm not going to search that far.

So either the technology needs to get better, or it needs to pretend like it's better, because I sure as hell am not going to search through all 2.2 million hits when I type in "How old is all soil damn it".