Resumen
The article focuses on issues dealing with information overload and cyberspace. Together with perhaps fossil fueled transportation, electricity and television, cyberspace seems to have far reaching consequences for the society. The installment of "Digital Village" is the first of several columns that will look at the future of cyberspace in the next decade. The most immediate cause of information overload on the Web is caused by the Web trying to fill the dual role of being both a private and public information and communication medium. Issues that are privately important tend to be publicly uninteresting. When the background noise of the medium drowns out most of the useful content for the wider audience, as is now happening on the Web, the effectiveness of the medium is undercut. The first attempt to deal with the information overload on the Web was the search engine. Modern species of search engine typically consists of an HTML, form-based interface for submitting a query, an index database with an internal string matching routine and some form of network indexer.