Is the internet broken beyond repair?

Thirty years ago Oasis topped the charts, my waist was still slim and the world wide web was new and exciting. It was a simpler time and the web was a much smaller and much less commercial environment. Internet shopping was in its infancy with Amazon having only just been formed and still predominantly selling books rather than everything under the sun.

The internet (or more accurately, the world wide web) was at a tipping point; about to move from a nerdy special interest into a widely used everyday phenomenon. Up to this point, you could still get away with navigating the web by starting at a directory of web sites such as Yahoo or DMOZ and finding a site that seemed to cover the topic you were interested in. But as the number of websites sky-rocketed, so it became impossible for a human-maintained yellow pages of the web to keep up-to-date. This was the birth of the search engine age.

Early attempts at search were of mixed capabilities. Webcrawler, AltaVista and Lycos could usually be persuaded to give you the answers you sought but often you would have to try one and then another until you hit upon the best one for that query. Enter stage left: Google. It's hard to believe it now but Google was revolutionary. It had one search box and nine times out of ten it would lead you directly to the web page you were looking for. It was so accurate it even had an "I feel lucky" button that would skip the search results page and just take you to the first link.

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