A historical view

1980- ... Before we had generic search engines...

Using internet without having access to generic search engines as Google, Live, Yahoo etc.. Impossible? Yet, this was the case before 1990.

The TopicBook concept originated from the time their were no generic search engines widely available. Without search engines, how could one find valuable information on the rapidly growing internet?

A primitive way to find information, is to share links to interesting information with your friends and colleagues. Like that, you can learn from them, and they can learn from you! How would you share it? Send your friends an electronic message with your links or simply communicate the links through message boards or even more simpler ... one could use a phone.

One step more advanced would be to set up a page on the internet, and put your links plus including a small description, into that page, and then communicate to your peers the whereabouts of this page. This allowes one to add more links without having to communicate more. People could use your page as there reference page.

If you take this peer-2-peer link sharing information one step further, one could better store the page with links on a central server. Your peers could store there pages with their favourite links on the same server, and than one person creates a page containing links to the several submitted pages full of links. Now, looking back, it's obvious that the optimisation opportunities of this 'system' are almost without limits.

Bye the way, the above is no fiction, this really is how people actually did it! Until 1995!

1995 - ... The introduction of generic search

This 'link-sharing' system as desccribed in the previous paragraph had its obvious shortcomings. Internet was growing to fast and becoming too versatile to cover everything by hand. Managing everything and keeping everything up-to-date by hand soon was undoable. At this point, the introdcution of algorithm-based search-engine, running on powerfull computers, were a very welcome 'solution' for these shortcomings.

Suddenly one could search many many websites and find whatever information you're looking for. The search quality was improved dramatically and these search engines have changed our lives for good. Everyone agreed, the search-engine was not perfect, but it sure was way better then we had before! The link-share sytem was soon out of grace!

2005 - ... The web grows and grows

One decenium later, "generic search" also proved to have its shortcomings. The endlessly growing web, makes it more and more dificult to distinct quality from none-quality. Search engines feed us with endless numbers of search results, and the users has to do the final research himself in order to find the proper info in between all the irrelevant or spammed results. If you don't find what you need, you can refine your search criteria and start over again.

Search engines have one more problem, and that's that they huge popularity attracts many individuals who are trying to 'play' the search engines and by doing so trick the users into visiting their own sites. The ultimate goal of this is to confront visitors with all kinds of undesired search results. This category of clutter we call spam!

Quantity and Quality don't go hand-in-hand on this case.

2008 - ... Introduction of TopicBook

One can easily see that the actual work of making a distinction between good and bad links, is being done everyday by millions of users worldwide. Each person that searches for info on any topic, goes through the same process. Search, get to much results, try to find the right ones, refine search query ...

After further studying this phenomena, we thought we need a combination of the two 'systems'. This time there's no need to start from scratch though. We have the powerfull search engines, we have the knowledge learned from the past. We need to put it together. Here's the TopicBook concept ...

We need one person who specializes in a certain topic, and who is willing to be a TopicEditor. This editor can use the search engines in combination with his/her own expertise and creativity to do do research on the topic. Ones the results of this research is placed on a compact TopicPage, we have a nice and compact overview of where to find information on the documented topic. If we find more TopicEditors, and offer them an opportunity to work together, the TopicBook will soon be a recognised valuable source of information people worldwide will put their trust in!