Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves

Finding the Web

—[26-1-01] When I first started using the web, it was in its infancy. I had used BBSes before, and even dabbled in using the Internet—FTP, Gopher, e-mail… but the Web had only recently emerged, and it was exciting stuff.
Not long before this time, the World Wide Web referred to a collection of university sites, partial libraries, and research documents. But when I came to it, its identity had already shifted dramatically. I found images, style, and above all a community of people who were in constant awe of their newfound ability to be heard around the world.
The web had become a much bigger place, one with businesses trying to make a name for themselves, people just trying to show what they knew how to whoever was reading, and a few off the wall places that, in a way, characterized the web as I knew it then… neat places like, for example, the Internet Squeegee Guy and Spatula City. And in all of these pages, even the business ones, the most important part to the reader was often a set of links… links to more of the same, other favorite sites, links almost to anywhere.

Really, in fact, that's what the web was then… links to other pages. It was really a web of links, each page going back and forth to so many others. You could draw a map, and it would look like some strange, multi-spider web spun in a zero-gravity environment, strands traveling every which way, with no regard to the shape of the web as a whole, but still creating some almost unreal beauty.
At the time, those links were the most important part of this new bit of the Internet. They were the World Wide Web, named according to its nature. But the nature of things can change, and when men (and women) are concerned, that happens quite a bit. Enter the Search Engine. >>

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