wahlau's online hut

finding the right information online is never easy. You often have following problems:

1. dunno where to start
2. dunno where to end
3. cannot find a consistant statement - many information contradict with each other.
4. 5 pages after the first google search result, you still don't see what you need.

For example, i tried to find out whether do Malaysians need to apply Visa before entering Egpyt... and from different sources i get different information. A call to embassy cleared up the issue - We can go directly without visa if we stay not more than 14 days (perhaps total 14 days). I thought such information can be found easily online - nope, i was wrong. So far the best information that i find useful is at wikipedia, concerning Malaysian Passport, and a new site called wikivisa.org (what a site!). So for travellers, you can perhaps follow this line to find the first hand information, before you start calling the offices.

I think the current search approach is fine, but soon we need something better. The call was here a few years ago - Semantic Web should help with better search results, but we are still not that close to it. The tagging/folksonomy approach has somehow reached saturated state, so folksonomy 2.0/3.0 should come to provide more (some started with Ontology for Tag), else we will still get ambiguous results still... 

If you really need tips, i think phrasing for your search query is very important. Something too general usually will still return you not-so-precise results. So choose something specific and you might find them faster. Secondly - whatever that is not yet done, will not be found! so it is time to contribute to the www your own contributions, so that people can find it later ;)

Now time to go back to work, and then prepare for the upcoming holiday. oh i can't wait anymore ;)

(yes, Jochen, the visa information sites might be good resources for you and your customers :))