Surfing
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Alta Vista is a great site, enabling you to wade through tons of information you know you didn't want and hundreds of links which seem interesting but doesn't work. Then, there are a couple of dozen links to the same commercial site promoting a book on a vaguely related topic. Then, if you're lucky, there are two or three links left which both work and lead to interesting information. But, even after all this, I still use Alta Vista, for the reason behind all those troubles. Alta Vista has the largest index of web sites there is. In the highest concentration of information, the most information is available if you have the patience to find it. Alta Vista rules on sheer volume, and ability to look through that volume quickly.
Beacuse we here in Sweden have to pay for every second we spend online, I want to get as much information as possible in as short time as possible, or phone bills would kill me. This means the opening of multiple browser windows, saving of any page with more than five lines of text and often remembering things you would have liked to do online once you have disconnected. Then, the next time you connect, you forget half of all those things you thought you should do. Ought to get a notepad ...
Addition on February 1, 1999.
Just thought of a new money-saving way of surfing; cache surfing. Made possible by ridiculous hard drive sizes, this technique would mean browsing through as many sites as possible when online without reading them. Then, when offline, you surf them in your browser's cache folder. Brilliant, isn't it? Maybe not ...
Addition on June 24, 1999.
Actually, I think there are programs for the above activity ...
Addition on February 9, 2000.
I do lots of cache surfing nowadays, saves a lot of precious online time. Then again, sometimes I sit around long periods just chatting through ICQ, wasting time and bandwidth, so the scales are probably still pretty even ...
Addition on February 17, 2000.
Forgot to mention, in case you haven't noticed, Internet Explorer allows you to do cache-surfing through the "recent" (correct translation?) folder, but also through the favourites list. Comes in handy ...
