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Since Tim Berners-Lee’s original idea for a global system of interlinked hypertext
documents from 1989, the World Wide Web has grown into the world’s biggest
pool of human knowledge. Over the past few years, the Web has changed the way
people communicate and exchange information. It has created new business opportunities
and obliterated old business practices. As a borderless source of information,
it has been instrumental in globalization and cooperation among people and
nations. Importantly, it has also helped individuals join virtual communities and
take part in social networks that cross physical, cultural, and organizational barriers.
The rapid growth of information on the World Wide Web has, however, created
a new set of challenges and problems.
Information overload—In 1998, the size of the Web was estimated to exceed
300 million pages with a growth rate of about 20 million per month (Baeza-Yates
and Ribeiro-Neto, 1999). The real size of the Web today is difficult to measure,
although Web search indices cite a lower band number of unique and meaningful
Web pages. The Google search index was measured around 500 million pages in
2000, 8 billion in 2004, and more than 27 billion today. This constitutes an enormous
amount of information about almost any conceivable topic. While the early
Web often suffered from a lack of high-quality relevant pages, the present Web now
contains far too many relevant pages for any user to review. As an example, at the
time of this writing, Google is returning about 18.6 million pages for the “World
Wide Web” search phrase. If you fail to mark it as a phrase, an astonishing 113 million
pages are found to be relevant and presented on the result page. In addition,
the deeper Web generates information dynamically based on users’ queries. |
