Signposts in Cyberspace The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation (2005) / Chapter Skim
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6 Internet Navigation: Emergence and Evolution
6 Internet Navigation: Emergence and Evolution
Pages 281-312
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How, for example, can a single Web page be found from among billions when only its subject and not the domain name in its URL is known? To meet such needs, a number of new types of aids and services for Internet navigation were developed.1 While, in the end, these generally rely on the Domain Name System to find specific Internet Protocol (IP)
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While its primary focus is on navigating the World Wide Web, it does not cover techniques for navigation within Web sites, which is the subject of specialized attention by Web site designers, operators, and researchers.2 6.1 THE NATURE OF INTERNET NAVIGATION Navigation across the Internet is sometimes compared to the well-studied problem of readers navigating through collections of printed material and other physical artifacts in search of specific documents or specific artifacts. (See the Addendum to this chapter: "Searching the Web Versus Searching Libraries.")
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. Consequently, aids or services that support Internet navigation face the daunting problem of finding and assigning descriptive terms to each of these types of resource so that it can be reliably located.
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In this information services world, the provider's goal was to make description and search as neutral as possible, so that every document relevant to a topic would have an equal chance of being retrieved.6 While this goal of retrieval neutrality has carried over to some Internet navigation services and resource providers, it is by no means universal. Indeed, from the perspective of many resource providers, particularly commercial providers, attracting users via the Internet requires the application to Internet navigation of non-neutral marketing approaches deriving from advertising and public relations as developed for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and yellow-pages directories.7 Research on neutral, community-based technology for describing Internet resources is an active area in information and computer science and is a key element of the Semantic Web (see Box 7.1)
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Marketers have found ways to use the specific characteristics of the Internet,9 just as they have developed methods appropriate for each new medium.10 This has led, for example, to the establishment of companies that are devoted to finding ways to manipulate Internet navigation services to increase the ranking of a client's Web site and, in response, to the development of countermeasures by the services. (See "Search Engine Marketing and Optimization" in Section 7.1.7.)
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Thus, as the resources accessible via the Internet expand in quantity and diversity of content, number and diversity of users, and variety of applications, the challenges facing Internet navigation become even more complex. Indeed, prior to the use of the Internet as a means to access information, many collections of information resources, whether in a library or an online information system, were accessed by a more homogenous collection of users.
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6.1.4 Lack of Human Intermediaries Fourth, the human intermediaries who traditionally linked searchers with specific bodies of knowledge or services -- such as librarians, travel agents, and real estate agents -- are often not available to users as they seek information on the Internet. Instead, users generally navigate to the places they seek and assess what they find on their own, relying on the aid of digital intermediaries -- the Internet's general navigation aids and services, as well as the specialized sites for shopping, travel, job hunting, and so on.
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Travel agents that remain in business must get their revenue from other value-added services, such as planning customized itineraries and tours and negotiating with brokers. Although house hunters now can do most of their shopping online, in most jurisdictions they still need real estate agents with access to house keys to show them properties and to guide them in executing the legal transactions.
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18See Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure, 2000; and Thomas Friedman, "Is Google God? ", New York Times, June 29, 2003.
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An experienced searcher could incorporate context by expanding the query to "Paris France," "Paris and Iliad," "Paris Texas," or "plaster of paris." So the lack of context in many navigation requests is closely related to the user's level of training or experience in the use of navigation services.23 21"Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII) is a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 12,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries.
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return search results in clusters that correspond to different contexts -- for example, a search on the keyword "network" returns one cluster of results describing cable networks, another on network games, and so on.24 Still, issues of context complicate Internet navigation because the most widely used navigation services are general purpose -- searching the vast array of objects on the Internet with equal attention -- and because many users are not experienced or trained and have no access to intermediaries to assist them. 6.1.7 Lack of Persistence Seventh, there is no guarantee of persistence for material at a particular location on the Internet.
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. There is an equal certainty that whenever this report is read, even in the year of its publication, some of the referenced Web pages either will no longer be accessible or will no longer contain the precise material that was referenced.
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So what is persistent in this case is not the answer, but the question. These are arguably not new conundrums -- analogies occur with edi tions of books and bibliographies, but the opportunities on the Internet for faster turnover and for changes of finer granularity, as well as the ability to update search indexes at very high frequency, make the meaning and achievement of Internet persistence more complex and ambiguous and difficult to understand for the casual user.
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Fortunately, the Internet has also served as the infrastructure for the development of new means for responding to these challenges. As the following section and the next chapter show, a wide range of navigation aids and services now permit large segments of the Internet to be traversed rapidly and efficiently in ways previously unimaginable, providing ready access to a vast world of human knowledge and experience to users across the globe and opening an international audience to purveyors of content and services no matter where they may be located.
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29The early period of rapid development of Internet navigation aids was not well documented, nor are there many good references. Many of the critical developments are included in this brief history, but it is not intended to be comprehensive.
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36The burden this imposed on the FTP servers led the operators of many of them to create and keep up to date an Archie-usable listing of the server in its root directory and to keep those listings up to date, obviating the need for Archie to search the server. 37Gopher, created in 1991 by Marc McCahill and his technical team at the University of Minnesota, is not an acronym but is named after the mascot at the University of Minnesota.
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In 1993, Jughead added keywords and Boolean search capabilities to Veronica.40 The next step in the evolution of Internet navigation aids was the wide area information server (WAIS) that enabled search using word indices of specified files available on the Internet.41 The WAIS search engine received a query, sought documents relevant to the question in its database by searching the word indices, and returned a list of documents ordered by estimated relevance to the user.
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At the same time, the Web unintentionally made domain names valuable as identifiers, thereby raising their profile and importance. While FTP and Gopher sites used do 45See Michael F
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(See Box 6.2.) As noted in Chapter 2, it was commonplace to navigate across the World Wide Web just by typing domain names into the address bar, since browsers automatically expanded them into URLs.
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1 is a general name for resource identifiers on the Internet. Several distinct types of URIs have been defined: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
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Fielding, and L Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)
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These paid ads are the principal source of funding and profit for commercial navigation services. (Commercial Internet navigation is discussed in further detail in Section 7.2.)
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The development of Internet navigation aids and services, especially those focused primarily on the Web, stands in interesting contrast to the development of the Domain Name System as described in Chapter 2. Conclusion: A wide range of reasonably effective, usable, and readily available Internet navigation aids and services have been developed and have evolved rapidly in the years since the World Wide Web came into widespread use in 1993.
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ALIWEB, an Archie-like index of the Web based on automatic gathering of information provided by webmasters, was created by Martijn Kosters at Nexor Co., United Kingdom. First robot-based search engines launched.
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SearchSavvy, created by Daniel Dreilinger, a graduate student at Colorado State University, queried multiple search engines and combined their results. First commercial metasearch service.
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Alta Vista, the largest search engine, indexed 100 million pages total and received 20 million queries per day. Open Text Corporation ceased operation.
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Northern Light became the first engine to index 200 million pages. The FindWhat pay-for-placement search engine was launched to provide paid listings to other search engines.
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Library models provide a familiar and useful comparison for explaining the options and difficulties of categorizing Web resources. First, locating an item by its URL has no direct equivalent in library models.
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Ask Jeeves ac quired Interactive Search Holdings, Inc., which owned Excite and iWon. In November, Google reported that its index included over 8 billion Web pages.2 In December, Google, four university libraries, and the New York Public Library announced an agreement to scan books from the library collec tions and make them available for online search.3 SOURCES: Search Engine Optimization Consultants, "History of Search Engines and Direc tories," June 2003, available at |
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is small compared with those indexed by Google, InfoSeek, AltaVista, or other Internet search engines. Rather than create a common index to all the world's libraries, consistent and effective access to documents is achieved by dividing them into manageable collections according to their subject content or audience.
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Nor do libraries attempt the international, multilingual indexing that search engines do. The catalogs of libraries may be organized consistently on a country-by-country basis, at best.
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Belew, Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2000; Peter Brusilovsky and Carlo Tasso, "Preface to Special Issue on User Modeling for Web Information Retrieval," User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research 14(2-3) :147157, 2004; and William A
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