English 110 Essay 2 - Informative Essay

Cover Page

Ms. Farina,

Essay

Internet Problems

The Internet began as a place for scientists to share technical information and communicate over long distances using computers.  It was then gradually opened to the general public and began to expand quickly.  More useful websites appeared, but many sites appeared that had little or no meaning.  The Internet has become cluttered with useless information, and something should be done to clean it up.

Reorganization of the major search engines, or searchable lists of web pages, is definitely a necessity.  Organizing them in a way so that the population’s personal pages are separated from useful pages would again validate the usefulness of search engines. Once people design relatively useless pages they decide to share them with the world by registering them with the Internet search engines.  This means that anyone searching for useful information may have a chance to stumble across someone’s useless site.  This was not too bothersome in the beginning, but over time, with the increase of useless pages, more are found with each search rendering many search engines almost useless in some cases.  Pages I consider useless consist of people’s personal pages that contain only information about themselves or their pets and pages from webpage-based newsgroups where people post questions and answers for example.  Searching for certain items cause an endless list of these newsgroup postings instead of valid information.  For example, a simple search for the word “internet” on Infoseek, a major search engine, yields the “Ameritech Internet Yellow Pages” as the best result for this search.  This may be helpful, but the second “best” result according to this server is the “Internet Pizza Server,” a website that allows a person to create a virtual pizza.  This page may be entertaining, but is lacking in terms of usefulness.

Junk email has become another large problem that plagues many people.  It has become an industry to retrieve users’ email addresses and “spam” them with useless information and advertisements.  Every day I receive at least five unsolicited emails and up to ten of these nuisances on a busy day.  Many people have trouble sorting out the important email from the useless ones.  The fact that many servers offer free email addresses has made it even easier for “spammers” to attack.  One day’s emails contained spam advertising a method to make “Instant Money” while another offers the “Original Fat Blocker.”  It is to the point where I will receive a mass-email from someone advertising mass-emailing.  

Advertising has taken over the Internet.  It is nearly impossible for someone to view a typical page without finding an advertisement inviting them to buy a new product or discover more information about another.  For some sites this is a way to pay for the equipment so they can provide free services to individuals, but in various cases the ad chosen for the page may be inappropriate.  One example is my friend’s Christian rock band’s site.  One time it was noticed by a fan that an ad linking to a pornography site appeared on his page which, of course, was completely inappropriate.  This may have been a mistake, but advertising has gotten out of hand when things like that happen.

Another problem deals with the legality of certain pages.  Some sites have posted information on how to construct bombs, how to take advantage of the phone system, how to buy illegal firearms, and many other illegal acts.  This can be argued by the right to free speech, but how can this be considered free speech when all these sites describing how to commit these crimes post a disclaimer stating they are not responsible for what they have posted?  If the person that posted the site does not want to be responsible then he shouldn’t have the right to post it to begin with.

One last problem deals with the excessive amount of large graphic files on many pages.  Numerous sites include large, often animated, graphics to visually stimulate their viewers.  For people using a faster connections to the internet this isn’t much of a problem, but for users on slower modem connections this can pose a problem dealing with the time that it takes for a page to load.  Even large companies can be accused of neglecting the fact that today most users are still using slower connections and can easily become annoyed at waiting long periods for a single page to appear on the screen.