“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2011/09/how_did_you_fin.php

Clive Thompson is a published author, with one of his books titled "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better", published in the last year. 

In this blog post/article by Clive Thompson, he goes into Vannevar Bush's famous 1940s prediction of a trail-embedded research process, and how the internet of today has showed few signs of fulfilling this prediction. 

The internet of today isn't very organized. Either Vannevar Bush's idea of the Memex wasn't perfect conceptually thought out or the internet lacks in that respect. I just don't see anyone being able to document their entire history in "associative trails" on a web browser. The closest thing we have is web history, and as this blog post mentions, web history going back just a couple days doesn't show much insight into how you get from one thing to another. I notice this because there are no diagrams or pictures that go along with web history that show the onlooker how the user navigated the webpage, why the user would be tempted to open a new tab from a displayed webpage, no relationships drawn between existing tabs and how long each were left open for or overlapped on the screen; each tab's history gets thrown into the web history chronologically. If I were to highlight a webpage while I am reading it (which I often do, just to instill an excerpt in my mind as I mindlessly carry on reading), the highlights will not show up in my web history. 

This presents a major difference in the Internet vs. Memex juxtaposition discussion, in which Clive Thompson adds that handwritten inscriptions and notes are not essential on the internet. I don't think Vannevar Bush's vision of hypertext is even relevant anymore (neither does Thompson, which is convenient)… Vannevar Bush didn't envision the Internet and its ability to bookmark webpages, copy and paste, create text documents, and even search your web history for key terms. There is no need for "associative trails" anymore, because the system that exists presents more accessible information (through search engines and collective internet knowledge contributions) than the Memex could ever boast of. This is not a problem. The Memex's ideas of maintaining the initial trail of discovery is no longer something that is wanted; people no longer need to be transferred their friends' associative trails of discovery—they can Google a term like "climate change" and see thousands of internet denizens' research, analysis and thoughts on the term. The internet user no longer needs to see the "entire scaffolding by which they were erected." Like Clive Thompson may hint at, it's much easier and more effective to manage a bookmarks folder, and simply take notes in a single text document if you want to capture the reasons you went to a website, your reactions to the websites, what you were thinking, etc.