Written on 3rd June 2009
4 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Yep, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin begun work on their search engine, it wasn’t originally called Google. They went with the rather obscure Backrub, only changing it a year into development and yes, the hand in the logo was Larry Page’s, scanned.
BackRub supposedly was a reference to the underlying algorithm which counts backlinks as affirmative votes, the same approach that was then turned into (Larry) PageRank.
“Page and Brin noticed that BackRub’s results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. “They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal,” Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines – which ranked mostly on keywords – that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.” From Wired.
A year into development, BackRub turned into “the Google Search Engine,” which supposedly looked like the following in 1997: (more…)
Hartmut Esslinger designed the famous Apple IIc, which was Apples first portable computer (1984) and several other Macintosh prototypes. Including the very first iPhone from 1983 which you will likely have never seen before.
Is ‘Inter-net’ a French word? Where does TCP-IP come from? What was Arpanets role in the History of the Internet? It is all explained in this beautifully animated small documentary. We played it during lunch at the office today.
I Can Has Cheeseburger, home of the biggest collection of Lolcat images in the world reports that they have found the oldest known Lolcat in the world.
So, it should only be a matter of time before someone will come up with a Rembrandt featuring a much older Lolcat, only to be surpassed soon by an Egyptian Lolcat. How far back will we go?
Well, for now we just go back to 1905. From iCanHasCheeseburger:
This captioned cat picture postcard was found by Tracy Angulo in a Seattle antique store. Tracy tells us that the photograph is from 1905, which would make this officially the oldest cat picture with a caption, AKA lolcat, that we’ve seen.
The differences are clear. Proper grammar and a more formal tone was in vogue back then. But the similarities to modern-day kitten struggles and lolcats are amazing. ALL CAPS is still cool, but most importantly,she also no can has cheezburger. More than a hundred years later, all that’s changed is the spelling.
Lots of Twitter news today! A comment at the Twitter blog leads to a blog post by Dan Hollings who found this incredible machine from 1935 which essentially is Twitter “avant la lettre”:
TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England. Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends.
The user walks up on a small platform in front of the machine, writes a brief message on a continuous strip of paper and drops a coin in the slot. The inscription moves up behind a glass panel where it remains in public view for at least two hours so that the person for whom it is intended may have sufficient time to observe the note at the appointed place. The machine is similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.
Wow, a coin per message? They even had a better business model than Twitter!
At TheNextWeb.org we like to look forward and talk about events as they happen. But today I would like to look back and make you remember the very first time you went online. How did it feel? What did you do? How did it change your life?
My first time online was in 1995. I had bought a modem after I graduated from art school and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A local ISP was very helpful with setting up ‘Config PPP’ and TCP/IP on my Macintosh Quadra 660AV. The whole procedure took us about two hours. I was one of the fist Apple Macintosh clients the ISP had. I think the whole company consisted of just one guy with a bunch of modems under his bed.
Getting connected took a few minutes and started with the familiar screeching sounds every modem used to make when trying to connect. It generally took multiple tries to get connected and often I would get disconnected without reason mid-session anyway. My dial-up speed was 14.4k and the first browser I used was Mosaic but I used that only to get to Netscape and then used Fetch to download a version of Netscape.
I don’t remember what version of Netscape I used but do remember the 2.0 version coming out not long after I got online. I also remember that a new version of HTML was introduced which allowed background images. Suddenly the web looked so much cooler!
My Macintosh Centris 660AV
Within a day or two I realized I wanted to build homepages too and had to learn HTML. So I got on my bike and went looking for a book that would teach me HTML. I remember vividly sitting in my parents garden reading my “HTML 1.0″ book and trying to explain to my parents how incredibly exciting that was.
Within a week or so I had built my first homepage which relied heavily on my Apple Quicktake 1.0 and Photoshop 1.0. Unfortunately within a month my ISP took my site offline because it was generating too much traffic. Ever since I have been hooked.
So, now it is your turn. When did you go online and what happened?
The growth rate of the Internet is accelerating in such a degree that a rather amazing related milestone was passed; Google’s spiders discovered the trillionth URL. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 WebPages indexed, Cuil reported to have indexed almost 122 billion pages with the help of the Internet Archive. According to Google, the World Wide Web is growing at a speed of a billion pages per day.
Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj tell explain how Google downloads the web, and reprocess the web-link graphs continuously, a Good example of how complex Indexing actually is:
“To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.”
Developing countries are logging in
As of March 2008, the Internet is estimated to have 1.458 billion users according to the Internet world stats. Most Internet users reside in Asia, followed by Europe and then North America. And the amount of Internet users in Asia are just increasing: India has over four million Internet users as of June 2008. Also this week, BDA reported that China became the country with most Internet users, surpassing the US with 210 million users. According to the report, over 70 million users updated their blogs/spaces in the blogosphere in the last six months.
If you’re coming from StumbleUpon, you probably like to see Bill Gates face in this short video! or grab our RSS feed for more European tech news
Here is a beautiful movie to help you survive another Mischievous Monday Morning. Its a television item which was broadcasted on October 8, 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is about a ‘new phenomena’ called ‘The Internet’.
For those of you who work in this industry it is good to realize just how young The Internet actually is. Just imagine what it will look like 14 years from now. Or don’t just imagine it and go back to work now and build it…
A few interesting quotes from the item:
“A revolution in which 15 million people take part”
“It has more soul than any human being I know!”
“The Internet is growing like an embryonic brain, at a rate of 10%, a month!”
The original can be seen at the CBC Digital Archives but here is a copy from Youtube:
A network called ‘Internet’ (6:25 minutes):
Written on 3rd June 2009
4 COMMENTS 
Written on 9th February 2009
Written on 29th July 2008
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