How did you find my site? - Memex

For the Memex assignment I found a neat blog post on the Memex and how it is applicable to modern search techniques by Clive Thompson, who wrote "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Wired. In "How did you find my site?" Thompson writes about how despite a large number of Vannevar Bush's ideas about the Memex being implemented into modern search engines, we lost one key aspect of the Memex, which is the ability to track the "trail" of how we found a site rather than just the end result of the search. Thompson also comments on several available tools to track trails through websites, though a number of them are defunct or require manual input.

I don't know how I feel about how necessary saving the "trail" is. Bush and Thompson certainly think it is an important piece of the search process, but I'm not convinced. I can see the merit in being able to trace your steps back in order to find similar information again, but at the same time the type of information I look for most of the time is easy enough to find that starting another search to me seems almost easier than retracing my steps. Of course in cases when it is more difficult than that, it would be a nice feature to have, but I think that hypertext and tagging systems encompass enough of that functionality that it isn't entirely necessary.

Source:
"How did you find my site?" and Vannevar Bush's memex
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2011/09/how_did_you_fin.php