Google this. I was around when you had to start Windows from DOS. No Icons, no user friendly Operating System. Instead we built our own menus with DOS batch files. We surfed the net when Netscape was king of the browsers and my mail was fetched by Eudora. I used Yahoo and Alta Vista as my first search engines before everybody told me that I should try Google aswell. The number of web sites were growing by the thousands and the search engine companies understood very well that they had struck gold by inventing very useful tools to find just the information you needed.

I remember the discussions about how to handle all the information that was sudddenly available. It was too much to handle. With the internet you had such a fast growing source of information that companies did not know how to process or manage it. Or more... how to find what you needed. The market needed those searching tools bad.

Webs were build focused on size and speed. With my 14k4 telephone line modem it could take several minutes to download a website with a lot of graphics, let alone animated images. So what happened was that the search engines developed tools to find what was there. Scanning the text content of the websites. Providing an answer for those whe where desperately seeking their information. The information highway started to head to a direction.

So what happened is that on order to be found web builders started to adapt their webs to be better "findable". Sinds then the world has turned around. Search Engine Optimization had been born. Nowadays it is priority one to optimize your website to be found. The bandwith of the net has increased, and is still increasing, and the focus is on traffic. How many people visit the site, where do they come from and how can we improve. SEO is hot and if well studied you can earn a living with it.

Marvelous you´d say, right? So why cry about it? Well, as designer and programmer I know the discussions. I´m always in the middle of it. I understand the designers point of view, the programmers/production point of view and the clients point of view. What, what what.... what point of view. What are you talking about, man? Get to the point. Ok, well if we look back (again) we see an enormous evolution in the design of the websites. From plain text websites where they threw the text at you, preferably in bright pinky colours with a green background, impossible to read, to a well considered navigation with a clear structure to find the information you need. Developed by usability experts and graphic designers. We are offered a variety of informational websites and entertainment sites. Web 2.0. Communities, news sharing, personal collections of information from all over the network.

I think though that the internet medium is not nearly used as it could possibly be. (a bit like my brain) Though a lot of concepts are unique and interesting, the way it is presented it still in the good old book and magazine way. Text and illustration, be it animated or not. Yes, focused on findability, because when you leave the search engine highway, you disappear from the map.

Do I have an answer to how I think it should be? Not really. Not yet anyway. But I think we as builders of the web should keep thinking about how to evolute and switch off all the environmental obstructions that block the way. Have an open mind. Don´t you think that the search engines should worry about how to find our sites instead of us worry about how our sites can be found?