Searching and Filtering

Ben Hammersley, astute, as usual:

It’s always said that the future of intellectual development is in being able to wrangle search engines. You don’t need to teach anything, the half-idea says, other than basic Boolean notation and Advanced Googling. This has a lot to be said for it, for sure, but perhaps it can be paired with the other key life skill for the 21st Century: filtering. Without spam filters, virus filters, spyware removers, pop-up blockers, email filters, ad-blocking proxies, smart subscriptions and smart lists, life using the internet would be much more difficult.

★ Saturday, 4 September 2004