There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.
Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.
Choi: I love [this contemporary banana cream pie] because sometimes new presentations create that iconic or nostalgic thing, but then they don't taste like nostalgia. But this one tastes like a banana cream pie.
Puck: So many young chefs today forget that food has to be delicious. If it's not delicious, why do it? If it's just interesting, you go once, that's it – "okay, I get it, but I don't want to go back."
Choi: I hear you chef. That's what I teach my cooks. I say, "You can do anything you want, but if you can't beat a banana cream pie, then the banana cream pie still wins." In most cases they don't. They can't beat the original.
We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click.
No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination.
Google has become the de facto gatekeeper of the web, an arbiter of what is useful and what should get visibility. Except, most websites that appear on the first page, the links that you are most likely to click on—less than 1% of searchers click on something in the second page—are designed to be there by optimising for Google's algorithms. One consequence of this is that most of the websites that people get to "organically" are created by professionals and marketers who "position" themselves on those keywords. This means that the smaller, amateur web gets hidden in the shadows of web professionals who design around specific keywords and audiences.
It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.