Hyperlink Apocalypse

How much control do individuals have online? What changed?

This is a page that pulls code from The Barwick-in-Elmet Historical Society page, which has been online since 1998.

Tim Berners-Lee is the computer scientist that invented the World Wide Web. The internet is the network of computers that are online via the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is an information retrieval system that connects pages and websites via hyperlink or hypertext, also invented by Berners-Lee. Search engines are database indexes which allow users to keyword search the World Wide Web.
But there was a time before search engines.
Tim Berners-Lee’s first software experiment was called Enquire. It was a system made up of pages or “nodes”, which he compares to index cards. New nodes were made via link from existing ones, so that the system itself would create what he began to refer to as “the web.”
The links between pages showed up like a footnote at the bottom of a page, and the only way to traverse between links was from the first page. There were internal links from one page to another in a file, which would show up on both pages, and external links which could jump between files, so only went one way.
Search Engines for the World Wide Web simplify its use by a lot. Brian Pinkerton’s WebCrawler, and Jonathon Fletcher’s JumpStation were almost immediately overshadowed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s BackRub, on Stanford University’s network in 1996. In 1998 they changed the name to Google.
Google's algorithm was by far superior to those of its competitors. Its algorithm for pages on the web is called PageRanker. Pages are "more important" if important pages link to them. What are called "crawlers" or "bots" determine the usability and quality of the search results, and things like outdated linking tags, present in the code for this very page, put that result lower in the search result list that a user receives.



This means that the vernacular web is harder to find. But using something other than Google to be online is harder to do too.
As of March 2025 the Department of Justice is attempting to regulate Google's monopolization in search. On March seventh The New York Times reported the government's stance: “The American people... are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting, ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.”

“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked…Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything.” (Berners-Lee, 4)
Corporations like Google run everything else online too.

Companies like Meta and Apple are also under fire for faulty privacy practices, which put their users at risk.
Do you know how your data is used? Companies collect more revenue everytime you DON'T click on a hyperlinked page like Berners-Lee first intended you to.

The less you use hyperlinks to traverse the web, the more you rely on search engines.

Much of the information you spontaneously encounter online is the result of data brokerage and its algoithmised results.

Because the old web was uncomplicated by these corporate/financial factors, it was more publicly driven.

Why should we push ourselves to interact differently online? How do we question the way the internet feels?
 
Personal Places
(Modern vernacular web.)
(examples below)
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What does the architecture of the internet encourage users to create?