I recently had questions relevant to what I was doing, so I typed queries in a search engine. In one of them I came up with more than sixty-eight million possibilities for websites to read.

Unfortunately I was not able to quite make it through all of them to see what tidbits they could offer, but with the ones I did visit, I did not feel confident that my quest was successful.

We have witnessed an explosion of data available for public consumption in the last couple of decades, and that is a good thing. Expansions of knowledge can help to improve processes, lives and societies. An educated populace is generally a positive influence on society.

Sixty-eight million websites is a lot of possibility, though, a lot of what people generally call information. It is, in fact, not really information. It is simply data. I read a definition of information long ago, and it stuck with me, though the author’s name has not: “Information is the answer to the question asked.” If something doesn’t answer your question, though it may be very helpful in other circumstances, it is not really information for you. It is only data.

You, as the searcher, need to filter out what is good and relevant data from what is bad or irrelevant in order to convert that into information. Search engines have become much better at providing more relevant websites first, but there are still problems. What do you do, for instance, when searches present multiple items that are in direct conflict with one another? You must decide which ones you take as relevant or true.

Even on websites for large organizations of good reputation, including science and other objective material, a lot of what is presented is opinion. Though it hopefully has some basis in evidence, interpretations of objective fact necessarily include a good deal of subjective judgment. Rational people can interpret facts in different ways, so it is possible to get opposing views, based on the commentators’ own biases in interpretations.

The proliferation of data is not all positive. Before the advent of the Internet, it was fairly expensive to publish any kind of content, whether that was advertisements, scholarly works or fiction. Now, anyone with a connection can start a blog for no extra cost. People can share their opinions, educated or ignorant, rant about politicians, or share cute pictures of their cats. That all becomes part of the billions of interconnected web pages that has become the Internet. With the proliferation of technical tools, it is quite easy to create fake news, spam and malicious content at low cost.

It is a steep downside to free or very inexpensive publication and consumption of web content. Because of low cost, the supply has become overwhelming, and sometimes dangerous and harmful. Most of the content out there is entirely irrelevant to anyone other than the creator or a small circle of interest. Data overload replaces data scarcity, but that overload itself degrades the usefulness of the body of knowledge for use in developing relevant, true, and timely information. The needle is hidden in a bigger haystack.

How do you determine what is relevant and true? Ironically, it is the same way that people did it before the technology boom. Our own framework for understanding the world, our own biases, our own experiences and knowledge predispose us to ask particular questions in particular ways and to search for answers that won’t upset the apple cart. The Internet can speed up the process, but the Internet certainly is not about truth. The information we end up with depends on the questions that we ask.