1. "Nothing is ever gone from the Internet" is a common enough saying, typically invoked when a prominent figure's embarrassing posts from years' past are uncovered. From the point of view of the researcher or investigator, it's a sadly inaccurate saying, as we are painfully
2. aware of how evanescent so much content on the Internet actually is. Pages, sites, and accounts get deleted all the time; it's a fact of life (so SAVE or SCREENSHOT things you want). But one of the things that frustrates me personally, having used the Internet as a research/
3. investigation tool since 1994, is when information once available suddenly no longer is, typically because a site or company eliminates access to it. I'm not talking about paywalls (that's another story), but other resources. One older example involves Usenet, one of the most
4. active areas of the Internet in the 1990s and even today a theoretically useful repository for historical information and content. There once was an excellent search engine for Usenet called DejaNews--but it was bought by Google, which changed it into Google Groups, removed
5. the search interface and replaced it with a much inferior one. Many Usenet messages now seem lost or inaccessible to searches. Google has also provided, then removed, its own services. It created a very useful desktop search engine, for example, then stopped supporting it.
6. Perhaps most frustrating for me is Google News, which used to have many capabilities it no longer has, including more and more reliable ways to search older news--dating back decades thanks to digitized newspapers. Now all those digitized papers are gone--even those that are
7. long out of copyright, as is much of the search interface. Google Books, too, used to provide far more content, but copyright legal wrangling caused it to eliminate access to much of it (again, even for many works out of copyright). Google is hardly the only company to
8. introduce, then remove something. One used to be able to use Amazon's internal search engine to search the whole content of most books. If I wanted to see, for example, which books cited "Mark Pitcavage" in an endnote, it was easy. That's all gone now. More recently, Amazon
9. seems to have become more restrictive even in what it displays of book contents with its "Look Inside" feature. Other windows of information opportunity are long gone, too. There was a period where there existed third party search engines to search public Facebook posts, but
10. Facebook changed its code to eliminate that; now one must rely on its clunky--even maddening--internal search engine. So the bottom line is that not only does information constantly disappear from the Internet, so too do the tools on the Internet that can be used to obtain
11. information. So don't take the tools that still exist, or may exist in the future for granted--use them until the tires fall off, because they may not be around forever.
