Surf, don't search

You're using the internet wrong. That's quite a statement, isn't it?

The power of the Web is its hyperlinked nature. It's a web, not just a repository. Yet we're increasingly searching everything on monolithic search engines like Google. That's bad. For one, it limits you to a very small portion of the Web—and it's not the best part either.

But also: our brain works by association:

When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it's some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and ā€¦ think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I'm lucky, an answer pops into my head a few moments later.

One of my favorite questions to ponder these days has been: when I'm thinking or remembering, just in that moment when my eyes are closed and I'm sending all that extra energy to my brain, what's really happening? There are no hard drives to spin into place in my brain. What's taking up all that time? It's easy to wave your hands and say ā€œit's just computingā€ or whatever, the way you expect slow computers under load to be. But often when I'm heads-down thinking, I'm not crunching numbers or solving logic puzzles in my head. I'm not really sure what I'm doing, but it usually feels like just staring into the void and hoping for some idea to pop into my mind.

The human mind [...] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

If we imagine the repository of ideas and memories in a mind as a kind of tangled web of ideas, ā€œthinkingā€ definitely involves traversing and scrambling across this web somehow, with some intent. The more obvious, trivial thoughts are the associations that are immediate and close by, and the more insightful thoughts may be jumps between ideas that are only loosely connected, or only connected by second- or third-degree leaps in association.

The most valuable aspect of the Web is the ability to travese sources in this way. By using a search bar you're missing this crucial aspect of the Web.