Sifting The Wheat From The Chaff
By Lincoln D. Stein
Some days I feel like I'm browsing a gigantic maze. There I sit, the entire Web at my fingers, trying to put together a collection of Java applets that medical doctors might find interesting. An AltaVista search turns up a hundred or so references, many of which look promising. I follow the topmost link and find not the home page of an applet developer, but a document containing links to medical pages of various sorts. I follow the link labeled "Java applets" and find myself at Sun's Java page. No good. I backtrack to AltaVista and follow the next likely link, which takes me to a medical-textbook publisher. No applets here either, but I do find a promising link to a "directory of Web-based medical-education software." I follow this link, only to find that it's taken me to a different page in the first site I visited. Help! I'm going in circles!
Broadly speaking, there are two types of Web sites: information-rich and link-rich. Each type has its place in the world. The link-rich sites give you the road map; information-rich sites provide the payoff at the end of the journey. While all sites provide some mixture of links and information, a few specialists are skewed to one extreme or another. Yahoo, for example, is almost 100 percent links. A Web without Yahoo would be an impoverished place, but a world of Yahoos wouldn't be much fun either. Imagine a Web consisting of nothing but Yahoos; an endless net of links pointing at each other!
When I search the Web for a bit of knowledge, sometimes I'm looking for a link-oriented site to outline the big picture, and sometimes I'm looking for a detailed monograph.
