Question about the internet on TV?

[Brian]

It's amazing how many different variations of internet 'search engines' are depicted on 'television' shows, all that seem to function differently than the other.

It's almost as if they all live in different worlds and google doesn't exist within theirs....

Need direct evidence of alternate realities? Look no further.

Oh yeah. Or there's always that 'story' that tv production studio's programmers have THAT MUCH time on their hands they can do custom search engines faux fronts just because they are THAT bored!

ON a serious note, has anyone taken the time to document the alternate reality web sites, IP address schemes, and internet search engines depicted on tv shows? it seems like each reality has a different IP address range, and clearly different search engines.

I am wondering - how to access these as 'the layman' without the cool tech the NSA or CIA has? Would be totally cool surfing web sites in alternate realities for ideas ya know?
ZArn, I gave ya a thumbs up because of a respectable answer, but truth be told, there's plenty of 'stories' dismissing the possibilities that we're looking at alternate realities but there comes a point where anyone with half a brain in use realize the stories are just that - stories.

I am not dismissing your answer. SOME of the work may be fiction written which quite possibly in turn creates alternate realities. But with the sheer volume of 'entertainment options' out there - including games - you would think there was an entire world of programmers and media artists at work on the entertainment options.

Sorry bud, yours is a decent answer - that may reflect 10% of what we're seeing. But 10% does not make a whole.

So again, I reiterate, are you incapable of imagining how to access these, or do you just like to argue against potential progress inspired by science fiction?

[Zarn]

Some tv shows aren't using even anything remotely approaching a 'search engine'. If I recall correctly, NCIS was writing "input" directly into a Visual Basic window and getting real-time results without compiling. Good old Independence Day did the same, but mr. Goldblum's character wrote stuff directly into Turbo Pascal. The UI design for Iron Man and Shield were done by a futurist UI designer John Koltai, http://www.johnkoltai.com/IRON-MAN-2-Use...ace-Design

Mission Impossible 'hacked' Pentagon using a (then) beta web browser. Mostly, it's animation and graphical effects, usually enhanced by streaming unfiltered source code in the background - often from *nix systems. I suspect that the 'hacking' background that one of the bad guys in White House Down streamed the source for TCP / IP as his 'leet haxxor' attack.