An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION

"People keep asking me what I think of it now it's done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!"

—Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web

The last two decades have seen dramatic revolutions in information technology; not only in computing power, such as processor speed, memory size, and innovative interfaces, but also in the everyday use of computers. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, we had the revolution of the personal computer (PC), which brought the computer into the home, the classroom, and the office. The PC then evolved into the desktop, the laptop, and the netbook as we know them today.

The 1990s was the decade of the World Wide Web (the Web), built over the physical infrastructure of the Internet, radically changing the availability of information and making possible the rapid dissemination of digital information across the globe. While the Internet is a physical network, connecting millions of computers together globally, the Web is a virtual global network linking together a massive amount of information. Search engines now index many billions of web pages and that number is just a fraction of the totality of information we can access on the Web, much of it residing in searchable databases not directly accessible to search engines.

Now, in the twenty-first century we are in the midst of a third wave of novel technologies, that of mobile and wearable computing devices, where computing devices have already become small enough so that we ...