Have you recently performed a Google search and been disappointed to discover that you can't find what you need? This doesn't happen very often, but I'm here to suggest that it's going to start happening more and more. The World Wide Web is getting overcrowded and the amount of information available is exceeding the needs of the most cerebral users.

With the prevalent age of Web 2.0, pretty much anyone with a pulse and even some advanced chimps can publish something online. MySpace is living proof that the Internet is exponentially accelerating its evolution from a repository of information to a junkyard of teenager chat logs and emoticons. The increasing size and decreasing utility of the Net poses two significant problems:

• Problem 1: Providing Information – It is becoming much harder to create a name for yourself. Just about every reasonable domain name has been snatched by Kenya Tech and other making-life-miserable-for-less institutions. You have likely noticed that new businesses hitting the market have strange and/or long domain names. One I heard recently on the radio is saltlakecityhelpwanted.com which even notes their long domain name in their marketing slogan.
  
  Once you do get up online, you suddenly realize that you're a Chinese person in China. Big whoop. Whatever you're saying is being said already and whatever you're selling is on eBay for less. Sticking out on the web requires old fashioned techniques: TV and radio advertising, as well as having your latest book at B&N. Business presence is rapidly becoming a prerequisite to web presence for companies. And just for the record, this whole idea that floats around among naive start-ups that if you build a website you'll be instantly wealthy is less realistic than a beer commercial. Making sales requires marketing, not magic.


• Problem 2: Finding Information – Google is becoming an increasingly sophisticated engine. Their developers are constantly looking for ways to more accurately spider the web and match its content to searches. Even grandma is starting to learn how to modify her search parameters and use regular expressions lest she get pages of results she doesn't need. The problem is that there is too much information. Archives are piling up so that a search about a bug in your PHP code returns a forum post from 1999, four versions ago. And as stated before, as long as everyone can have their space on the web, this is only going to get worse.

So what's the solution? I don't know. But here's an idea: clearer information demarcation. The web may have to start being broken up in to categories which are separated by ports or perhaps more domain extensions (.com, .net, etc.). Want to learn about animals? Go to the biology net (.bio). Need help debugging that C++? Use the technology net (.tech). I think that was the original intent of ICANN, but there is no real regulation of what people do with domains (except .gov, .mil, .edu and other government-controlled ones).

Hopefully something cool will come along that will make this entire article invalid. Until then, we all face the reality that surfing is being replaced with sorting.