Not ever so long ago one could type in a request for information into one's confuser, and a collection of informative articles would appear. There were links to traders too, but they usually seemed further down the page.

Not now it seems.

I want to add to my skills (using the term advisedly) that of rope-splicing. I know a modest range of useful knots but there are applications where splicing would better, e.g. for making special lifting-slings for the workshop.

So I typed "Rope eye-splices" or similar.

This elicited not merely hundreds of ads with most having only slender linguistic connections to the topic, but a bewildering maze of links, mainly to ads, often going round in circles. I did find what I wanted, eventually, but it was far more difficult and time-consuming than even only a year or so back.

Most were videos too, which I find useless as tutorials. Indeed, those on the site of one of Britain's best-known, long-established rope-manufacturers were the worst I have seen – an object lesson in how not to make training videos.

I found static instructions on another site and printed them, though they are not very explanatory.

That is one example. I have found this with other topics – apart perhaps from Wikipedia, the information still exists in assorted blogs or whatever they are, but now buried under an avalanche of advertisements.

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Incidentally I did stumble on a rather lovely set of videos that animate the rope splicing itself, no human hands involved at all. The strands gracefully slide around, above and below each other like honeymooning snakes. The animations are continuous loops, and if given a random screen-location routine would have been great screen-savers on C.R.T. monitors!

(I do have a small book on splicing yacht-ropes. It says "almost anyone can make an eye-splice in three-strand [hawser-lay] rope" . Which is somewhat disheartening when it gives rather unclear directions to a technique far harder than it looks. Effectively you make three strands go through two gaps all the time, without threading one through an occupied gap, or discovering a previous strand has quietly sidled round the lay to meet its mate! It rather reminds me of a sleight-of-hand puzzle my Primary School Headmaster enjoyed showing us on the blackboard, of fitting a gang of 20 brigands into a 19-room inn so each had his own room – the story said they were so dangerous that if two shared, one might kill the other.)