So, you'd just like people to provide this material to you for free -- as well as the engine that lets you find them.
Me, I googled "how cuckoo clocks work" and got a page full of answers. Some of them are sites selling parts, but the specific pages answer the question. Who would I expect to have that information, aside from the people selling the parts?
One, of course, is Wikipedia, which would have been my first stop anyway. It's the best site for generic "learn about X" questions on most topics.
The way I see it, the alternative to an ads-based internet is no internet at all. Or at best, a vastly smaller one -- not just smaller because fewer people wanted to put up their content for free (and having to pay for the hosting), but even smaller because it would lose its status as the go-to place to do anything at all.
Maybe it's just because I'm of exactly that age where I wasn't born with the Internet but it hadn't yet become so commonplace as to feel like an entitlement. I'm constantly amazed at how much I can get for free, or at the cost of a small bit of attention.
I'd just as soon find a better way than ads, but nobody has perfected that kind of micropayments -- the $.02 that I'd be willing to pay for reading somebody's blog page, if and only if it turned out to be interesting. I'm glad we've gotten past the point where pages were unreadable because the ads were so very impolite. The compromise seems reasonably good to me.
Me, I googled "how cuckoo clocks work" and got a page full of answers. Some of them are sites selling parts, but the specific pages answer the question. Who would I expect to have that information, aside from the people selling the parts?
One, of course, is Wikipedia, which would have been my first stop anyway. It's the best site for generic "learn about X" questions on most topics.
The way I see it, the alternative to an ads-based internet is no internet at all. Or at best, a vastly smaller one -- not just smaller because fewer people wanted to put up their content for free (and having to pay for the hosting), but even smaller because it would lose its status as the go-to place to do anything at all.
Maybe it's just because I'm of exactly that age where I wasn't born with the Internet but it hadn't yet become so commonplace as to feel like an entitlement. I'm constantly amazed at how much I can get for free, or at the cost of a small bit of attention.
I'd just as soon find a better way than ads, but nobody has perfected that kind of micropayments -- the $.02 that I'd be willing to pay for reading somebody's blog page, if and only if it turned out to be interesting. I'm glad we've gotten past the point where pages were unreadable because the ads were so very impolite. The compromise seems reasonably good to me.