Those who have used the Internet since it first became widely available in the 1990s have watched with dismay as its usefulness deteriorated over the past decade. While computer manufacturers have installed faster processors and service providers have heralded generation after generation of supposedly faster connections, the reality has been a trend in the opposite direction. There is no doubt that technological advances have made all electronic systems work faster, but the increase in speed has been more than offset by manipulations in the service of commercial interests.

There was a time when you could type what you needed into a search engine and come up with a web page that supplied exactly what you needed and immediately responded to your further instructions. Now, search engines are programmed to ignore the full importance of one’s input and select only one or two commercially important words to provide the searcher with a plethora of unwanted irrelevant websites with something to sell. If you manage to find a website that is relevant to your search, it remains frozen and inoperable until the latest ad has been fully installed and then it becomes a minefield that you have to tread carefully to avoid further unwanted diversions. .

Those who write articles for publication online are familiar with the ezine publishing process whereby articles are republished on another website. It is interesting to find where articles are republished because they are often taken without respecting the rules of faithful reproduction. Some websites modify articles by using a software program that randomly replaces keywords with approximate synonyms, leaving the text garbled and nearly incomprehensible. An author may be relieved to see the absence of an attribution, but the practice is unethical and perhaps illegal, and it would be helpful to be able to identify offenders. However, an article title entry rarely results in anything useful, since the entry is no longer taken as a whole.

Most article titles have one or more words that can be linked to a product or service. The name of a country, for example, will flood the searcher with an avalanche of websites advertising airlines, hotels, package tours, and restaurants, and the name of any common product has the same effect. The words fit celebrity names, for example, King Freddie is invariably taken to mean Freddie King, whoever he is. Search engine operations have been progressively refined to improve exploitation by multinational business leaders. To adapt Mahatma Gandhi’s famous reflection on human nature, the Internet, which was said to have been invented to satisfy scientific needs, now primarily serves corporate greed.