On August 6, 1991, the first website as we know it was “born”. I was indeed, too, born around this time. While the “Internet” (which loosely refers to the ability for computers to send electronic communications to each other) had been around for longer, the ability to access the websites and impart knowledge & entertainment to the masses was something only dreamed of in sci-fi movies.
The Kid Years
According to the first website, “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
The World Wide Web is an information retrieval system consisting of hypertext, which allowed users to navigate through ‘pages’ of information which are interconnected using hyperlinks.
Twitter image of the old 90s Nickelodeon website.
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed the project, and had developed such principles as “HTML”, “HTTP” and “URLs”. The first web page launched at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.
I, too, evolved with the World Wide Web. We both went through our infancy together, gaining exposure to the world and new concepts. As the number of websites accumulated in the 1990s, search engines were developed to better organize, search, and find webpages. As I graduated from elementary school, I learned to organize, regulate, and retrieve my own thoughts, opinions, and ideas.
But the Internet was also scary. It was this new creature that could seemingly do anything. I was not allowed on the internet unsupervised. So, I was never in the AOL chat rooms of yesteryear that are so reminisced over in cyberspace.
In fact, I was doing a school report on "The White House”. So, my parents typed it “Whitehouse dot com” into the search bar and a porn site popped up!
Yahoo kids was for me.
The Teen Years
Then the awkward teen years of the 2000s of slow connections, and uncool website interfaces. The Internet was mainly accessed through clunky computer monitors and point and click mouses. Scrolling was slow, the pages crashed, and videos were pixelated and blurry. I was still lugging books home from the library to do reports and printing out web pages so I could access them again for those book reports.
Never mind my joy when I discovered Wikipedia!!
Screenshot of Wikipedia in 2007 curtesy of the WayBack Machine**. Wikipedia forever!! You will forever be better than a chatbot.
And the Internet accompanied me on the long search for colleges. We were buddies. I meticulously researched college websites, requirements, and SAT vocab words (signing up for SAT question of the day emails in high school), and even applied to college online!!
**I also discovered the WayBack Machine in high school and was hooked
College Years
Once we went to college, we inhabited spaces which were increasingly sleeker. With the advent of pre-ad Facebook and Twitter the internet was cool!! It was sexy, everyone wanted to display their lives on the Internet (except me). People wanted to date using the Internet. Videos were posted on YouTube!! You could access any show, movie, song you ever wanted!! You could videochat and instantly communicate with others.
(Fun fact: In college, for my first year our campus use of wifi was actually capped to a certain number of gigabits, so I watched DVDs since streaming used up most my monthly internet allowance. Fortunately, they dropped it after the first year).
Adulthood
Post-college we entered harsh the harsh reality. We saw the rigged systems and hierarchies of capitalism and right-wing conservatism. Our carefree days were over.
Major social media companies were filled with ads and commercialism. Big tech bros and billionaires took over. What could have been a democratic egalitarian platform evolved into the capitalistic hierarchy. W3 experienced Congressional investigations. The Internet was weaponized for to overthrow elections and misinformation.
I spent 6 years in graduate school, learning how to create an elevator pitch that was easily understandable to lay people. Networking, applying for grants, getting rejected, facing disillusionment as I neared 30 about my career path, my writing ambitions, and the then, unemployment.
The 30s
Then we hit 30. The world shut down in a global pandemic. The W3 was the window to the outside world. Our way to communicate and connect with others. Tech stocks stored.
I spent hours online, writing, typing, researching, rewriting essays, papers, and finally getting published. I watched a lot of movies, television shows, the news, podcasts, and listened to music constantly. I exercised to videos on YouTube and talked to friends and family via video chat. My life shrunk to a room where I viewed the world through a laptop screen.
Then, we were re-invented again.
I got a great job, moved to another state, started over, yet again. ChatGPT hit the scene. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), we are entering a brave new world. Algorithms are getting us hooked. They could be replacing our jobs. They create digital, alternative-world experiences.
The World Wide Web is a story of re-invention, constant re-invention in a capitalistic world.
Will LLMs fundamentally change the Search Engine as we know it?
In the early to mid-90s, search engines were organized more like physical libraries, with websites grouped by topic or alphabetically. Soon, hierarchies containing lists of websites were curated by human editors. Search engines developed, which allowed users to find web pages based on search terms.
Yahoo! (Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle) Search engine in 1996 curtesy of the Wayback Machine. Click here to play around with it! Websites are grouped by topic.
This was very time-intensive and computer science and statistical principles were soon added to search engine development. The landscape for search engines became highly competitive. Slowly, search engines were able to handle ‘natural language inquiries’ rather than a list of stock search terms. Boolean logic was introduced so terms like AND, OR, and NOT could allow users to narrow or broaden their results. Web crawlers, a software that ‘crawls’ the web to find new content to add to search engines indexes, was a game changer and automated the discovery of new content. Finally, Google’s Page Rank System ranked pages based on the number of clicks they received, which helped Google differentiate itself from other search engines, rendering Google as the ‘top’ search engine for decades.
Google Search Results, August 3, 2025.
Now, as we round up the first quarter of the 21st century traditional search engines are facing replacement from AI.
Google’s “AI Mode” provides a summary to a search query rather than a list of web pages. While AI mode apparently contains links to some web pages, there is concern how this will divert user traffic away from many websites and fundamentally change the World Wide Web as we know it.
Browsing and digging through websites may become more difficult. While top sites are already at the mercy of search engine hierarchies, users still have the ability to dig through pages and pages of listed websites and select the site that seems reputable. Google is interpreting information for us, rather than allowing the user to find it ourselves, the original intent of the World Wide Web.
What the World Wide Web and I have most in common, is the pursuit of knowledge. I have spent my life reading, pursuing knowledge, and contributing knowledge to the world. The persistence of Wikipedia keeps hope alive. We’re resilient, we’ll be okay.