World Wide Wonder:
1991 - 1994
at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee completes the original software for the World Wide Web (WWW), the hypertext system he had first proposed in 1989. He envisions the WWW as a shared information space -- a web of hypertext documents -- within which people communicate with each other and with computers.
Berners-Lee had been motivated to design the WWW because he and his colleagues in the high-energy physics community were frustrated by computing incompatibilities. Their vast stores of data were difficult to access and exchange due to differing encoding formats and networking schemes.
Berners-Lee was working at CERN (Centre Européan pour la Recherche Nucléaire; European Laboratory for Particle Physics), in Geneva, Switzerland, when he developed the WWW. His vision for the system was far broader than many of his authorities at CERN were aware. He hoped that the WWW would be transformed from its origins as an information-retrieval system for physics researchers into a public information and communication device available on all computing platforms.
During 1990 and 1991 Berners-Lee develops the components of the WWW system. He works from several criteria: the system must be flexible and designed with minimal constraint so that it is compatible with numerous languages and operating systems; the system must be capable of recording random links between objects; and the system must be constructed so that entering and correcting information is easily performed. The first version of the WWW includes three basic architectural principles that aim to accommodate these criteria. The first is called Universal Document Identifier (UDI), an address scheme for pointing the system to a particular location within the WWW information space. UDIs are later renamed Universal Resource Locators (URLs). The second element is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); it serves as the protocol for accessing data and traversing hypertext links. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a documentation code designed to resemble the existing and widely used Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), is the third principle.
Berners-Lee unleashes the WWW first within CERN, then throughout the physics-research and hypertext-programming communities, and finally onto the Internet. From 1991 to 1994 use of the original WWW server (info.cern.ch) grows by a factor of ten each year as the world begins to take note of a new information phenomenon.
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There are many ways to get where you need to go on the WWW. For example, Yahoo! is a leader among Web directories -- collections of Web sites organized by topic. Web directories also include a search engine (Yahoo!, for example, uses the AltaVista engine) as well as special features like news services, horoscopes, classifieds, and yellow pages. Other Web directories include AOL Netfind, LookSmart, the Mining Co., Snap, and Webcrawler.
While Web directories use human editors to sift through sites and classify them appropriately, search engines use programs called "spiders" to index the Web. Quality basic search engines include Altavista, Excite, GoTo, Google, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, and PlanetSearch. To distinguish themselves from the pack, many engines offer special features like free e-mail or personalized splash pages. Northern Light has a collection of some five thousand magazines and journals that can be searched. (Abstracts of the articles are free; complete articles cost between one and four dollars.) Meanwhile, the Excite search engine uses a technique called Intelligent Concept Extraction, which searches for terms that are closely related to the search request; if you search for "children," Excite will also look for "kids." One recent entrant in the search-engine race is GoTo, launched in 1998. Unlike other engines, GoTo has an uncluttered front page that focuses exclusively on searching. Keep in mind, however, that GoTo asks sites to pay for a prominent listing in their index. The sites that GoTo lists first are not necessarily the most relevant -- they may have paid to be there. A recent trend in Web searching are the metasearchers, which search numerous engines simultaneously. These include Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Mamma, MetaCrawler, and MetaFind. The Ask Jeeves site uses "natural language" searching --users type in a question ("Why is the sky blue?") and get back sites that may answer the query. Dogpile searches not only the Web but also the newswires, Usenet, and FTP databases. |
