I read an article from the BBC website that talks about how Net giants challenge French data law. The article isn’t very specific about what the law actually contains. There also isn’t a link to the text of the law or the name (or number if you will) of this law. So while this creates a lot of commotion on Twitter, there is no way to search for the text of this law. The only name we got is ‘french data law’, which is in my opinion not very useful.

But of course this isn’t about this specific article. The problem is that if we don’t have a name, we can’t find something very specific, that is supposed to be very specific. In the example of a law, there are many versions of a law especially when it’s not accepted yet.

Search engines help us find some things and not others. The thing that is hardest to find, is the specific page of which you don’t know the specific name. There are two problems.

First you need to find the page. You need to know how to find it. Second, if you found a page, you don’t know if you have the right page. The original article talked about something really specific. Without some more clues it’s almost impossible to know if it’s the right one.