A smart, playful book about the underappreciated index | Hacker News Reader

A smart, playful book about the underappreciated index

nytimes.com

40 pointsprostoalex10 comments

"Duncan finds analogous anxieties in our Age of Search — the suspicion that by making it ever easier to access information, Google might in fact be making us lazier and dumber, allowing us to glide along the shallows instead of forcing us to venture into the depths. Duncan is less worried. "

Considering the several discussions here about how Google is letting its ad business and other corporate concerns distort search, and how users are trying to get around that to find actually useful indexing, this seems like a fairly naive response.

Mainstream search provides easier access to the equivalent of junk mail. Some paid search engines that index actually useful information can be pretty good. But right now Google just gives you the best spam that it can find, and potentially something halfway useful like the digital equivalent of a catalog entry for a book you can buy.

There are paid search engines?

Lexis-Nexis

That's more of a for-pay library with a search engine.

Kagi (still closed beta, extremely good, think of a modern version of Google at its best sometime between 2006-2010)

Neeva (freemium. No idea about the quality since it is not available to anyone except those located in the US it seems)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220216135221/https://www.nytim...

I love useful indexes. I didn't realize there were books written solely about them, though. I'll have to pick this up.

One related post but not much there:

Index, a history of the - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597724 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)

For a fictional analogue to this lovely book, check out Pale Fire by Nabokov. The book begins as ostensibly a long poem but slowly unravels itself in the index and end notes

Funny. Been reading this on and off for the last few weeks. Many clever tricks used today by SQLite or Google are in fact quite ancient technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com