The Internet is becoming more commonplace everyday. It’s become accepted that everyone has Internet access, just as we assume everyone has a television, though they may not have all the adult channels that I …that is, some might have. Despite the popularity of surfing, however, like many things in the computing world, it remains difficult to use. I’ve complied a list of gripes about the Internet today.

Addresses

One of the most frustrating things while surfing is making sure you get the address exact. Take www.discover.com, for example. A reasonable person would think it leads to Discover Cards, but it actually goes to Discover magazine, part of the Walt Disney regime. Wouldn’t it be nice if discover.com was required to pop open a window listing www.discovercard.com, and any other company with “discover” in its name.

Another pet peeve is the selling of the TLDs (the TLD is the .com, .org, etc.). “.com” was meant to be the general one, “.net” for Internet-related sites, “.org” for non-profit organizations, “.gov” for government, and “.edu” for educational sites. However, I’ve noticed a lot of sites — especially movies for some reason — are buying sites with “.org” and “.net” TLDs. This should be banned. I fail to see how American Pie is a non-profit org. Hopefully with the new options, fewer violations will occur.

Searching

Searching on the Web has changed a lot since I started using it. There was no Jeeves, or Google, or meta-searches; just good old searching on altavista.digital.com. Searching on the Web has actually gotten worse, not because there are a lot more pages — which does make it harder — but because search engines have gotten 1. dumber and 2. sold out. Dumber because searching “audio design AND Winona,” got different results than “audio design Winona”. Now engines ignore ANDs, ORs and quotation marks. This is probably because almost all, if not all, engines have sold out, and sold the top spot to the highest bidder, making searching worthless.

Commercialism

That brings me to my next, and favorite gripe. The Internet has become too commercial. I don’t mean companies putting up Web sites, which is a good thing, but the deluge of ads anytime you go online. The Web has become late night television, with ads for credit reports, choppers, slicers, dicers and hair club fetish sites. Go to almost any news/information site like www.pcmag.com or www.msnbc.com, and it’s hard to tell where the news ends and the advertisements begin.

Web Site Gaffes

There’s a lot here, so I’ll keep it short. Web sites should be required to have high and low-bandwidth versions. How many times have you fallen asleep waiting for some Flash or

QuickTime animation to load that you can’t escape? Not everyone has cable modem or DSL yet.

On a related note, any site that plays music should be put on the course registration server so no one can get to it. Same with any site that uses white text on a yellow background.

Well, that about does it for now. I could go on, but some punk kids are monkeying with the printer, and they’ll probably just break it.

Reach Michael Canavino at michael@canavino.com