Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: History known to the Web

I suspect strongly that this is due to copyright laws, but it's kind of a weird effect I've seen in Google, Wikipedia, and other search engines on the web. Stuff that happened in the real world before 1950 is generally on the web, if it was previously recorded on paper at all. Stuff that happened in the real world after 1998 is almost certain to be covered on the web if it hit any major news source, usually covered from a variety of angles. Stuff that happened int he real world after 2000 will not only be covered by professional journalists, but a million bloggers as well.

But anything that happened between 1950-1992 either isn't on the web at all, or is on the web only in a politically correct, extremely limited fashion. Stuff between 1992 and 1998 is covered also, but haphazardly and only if it related to the interests and hobbies of people who were able to code in HTML (my own cached web page from that time, including a poem that predicted that we'd be back in Iraq within 20 years, is a good case in point), usually highly intelligent philosophical discussions about the events of the time rather than a journalistic covering of the events themselves.

Anybody else notice this trend?

hmm

[Bill Dog]

You make an interesting observation. A couple of thoughts:

* In automobiles, no one's interested unless they're nearly new, or fascinatingly ancient history. If for example you were in love with 1979 Chevrolet Caprices (my first (/hand-me-down) car), you'd be probably hard-pressed to find restoration info and parts. There's a whole middle region of several decades where practically no one cares what went on during that time.

* Sites may be adding historic material in chronological order. For example, my mom i

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

(Okay, I now see why -- they're released to the public by the U.S. Census Bureau only after such time as personal privacy should no longer be a concern.

I suspect something similar is going on with the early portion of the data, in that information prior to 1950 is pretty accurate and (with a few outliers such as Census data) complete. I think it's a combination of privacy laws and copyrights that is limiting the information in between that and 1992. If so, baring of course extraordinary corporate copyri

not sure if I am seeing this

[zogger]

public records and private records? Public records might have been digitized a long time ago, heck, I was looking at gopher a long time ago and most of it was government produced, or org produced, such as UN records (I think they still run gopher servers). Stuff from the private sector before the early 90s is..well... it was still mostly in the form of dead trees, and it costs money to scan, upload and host, so where's the point for private corporations? They get nothing but expense for that. Earlier stuff

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The most recent one I noticed is comparing the case of the Reverend David Schwartz Rev. and Cheryl Gibbs, who got lost and died on OR 26 this summer; to Raymond and Lela Howard from Salado, Texas, who left home in June of 1997 to attend a family reunion but never arrived.

I ran across the first case because it's relatively recent- but bound to stay in Google's cache for a long, long time because it's been replicated across so many different servers. I ran into the second only looking for an explanation of