The Internet’s User Revolution: How We Took Control
▼ Summary
– The ARPANET project of 1969 evolved into the Internet, which by the late 1980s was a mostly text-based network used by academics and a few consumers.
– Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1991, and after its protocols were made free, browsers like Mosaic and Netscape popularized it, leading to the “browser wars.”
– The web’s exponential growth and hype peaked before the dotcom collapse in 2001, which led some to believe the consumer Internet was a fad.
– In 1996, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began a project to improve Internet search, developing a technique called “BackRub” that analyzed links between pages.
– The BackRub algorithm ranked pages by the number and quality of incoming links, a crowdsourced approach that was more effective than simply counting keyword occurrences on a page.
The internet’s transformation into a platform driven by its users represents one of the most significant technological shifts in modern history. This evolution began after the dot-com bubble burst, a period many mistakenly interpreted as the end of the web’s potential. Instead, it cleared the way for a new generation of innovators who understood that the true power of the network lay not in corporate gatekeepers, but in harnessing the collective actions of people online. The story of how everyday internet users gained control is fundamentally linked to the rise of smarter, more intuitive technologies that prioritized relevance and community over mere information retrieval.
In the mid-1990s, the challenge of finding anything useful on the rapidly expanding World Wide Web was immense. Early directories like Yahoo relied on human editors, while algorithmic engines such as AltaVista attempted to scan page content. These methods often produced clumsy, irrelevant results. The breakthrough came from two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their project, initially called “BackRub,” approached the problem from a completely new angle. Instead of just analyzing the words on a page, their software mapped the relationships between pages by examining the links connecting them.
The core idea was revolutionary: a webpage’s importance could be measured by how many other sites linked to it. This created a system where the collective judgment of webmasters determined a page’s ranking. If many people linked to a specific article about alligators, the algorithm interpreted those links as votes of confidence, making that page more likely to appear in search results for that topic. This technique, which would later become the foundation of Google, effectively crowdsourced the process of determining quality and relevance.
Building this interconnected map of the entire web demanded immense computational resources. Page and Brin filled their dorm rooms with a makeshift supercomputer, funded by a grant and often assembled from spare parts. One machine was even housed in a case built from imitation LEGO bricks. Their data-scraping operation was so intensive that it occasionally overwhelmed Stanford’s campus network. Focused entirely on the complex backend, they designed the most basic HTML interface possible, a stark contrast to the flashy portals of the era. This emphasis on powerful, underlying technology over superficial design signaled a pivotal change in what would define a successful online service.
(Source: Ars Technica)
