WEB GOOD:

• people put data there
  • standards
  • simple, easy to "publish" hypertext
  • cheap(ish)
  • empowerment of individual publication
• accessible
  • easy to browse
  • low-end users (***)
  • lots of $$ driving it (***)
  • cheap to use
  • inline graphics (in text)
  • equality of relevance to all data
• enables sharing
  • ex: biology, physics
• searchable
  • keyword search
  • distributed search
  • big user base, link/access patterns can drive metrics
  • fuzzy queries possible
• software distribution
  • apps (and upgrades to them)
  • applets
• uniform naming of network resources
  • URLs
  • decentralized
• standards
  • document format (HTML)
  • standard application (part of OS)
• services/commerce/information (w/direct access)
  • shopping, travel, stock trading
  • fresh, updated 24x7
  • at your convenience, on your own time
  • can get things at good price (ex: Yahoo shopping experience)
• distributed community-building
• customization of information services
  • custom pull
  • custom presentation

WEB BAD:

• unpredicatable performance ("world wide wait")
• no quality control: high volume, high variance in (quality) utility of information
• lack of classification
• publishing faster than classification
• security retrofitted after the fact, not good
  • personal info often transmitted electronically, more on public channels
  • lack of privacy (behavior and info)
• naming structure has (apparent) semantic meaning - semantic ids
• breakable / overly flexible document standards (HTML)
  • abused? missing?
• "eyeball encoding" of info
  • for humans, not for machines
• underutilized networked resources
• hard to find what you want (***)
  • different ways to get similar results
  • hard to compose right query (keywords)
  • hard to know what the data set is (time-varying)
  • hard to know what the queries mean
  • hard to debug (no explain facility)
  • hard to judge completeness of query results (GIGO)
  • query bait (deceptive metadata)
  • lack of non-text search facility
  • some image search
  • mostly exact (word-wise)
  • no structured search
• poorly maintained data
  • bad links
• evil HTML hacks ("trap"-like sites)
• long transactions are natural
  • time outs
  • no guarantees on ACID transaction
  • no end-to-end confirmation (general problem)
• bad product evaluation/inspection capabilities
• socio-political issues
  • huge, important, but out of scope
• replication/caching/multicast and other issues not auto-solved
• spiky traffic
• lack of human organization of data
  • fixable at some scale
  • but: different classifications, fast rate
• lack of good natural language queries (general problem)
• software quality
• decentralization - ex: SW airlines