"Net Surfing," as a concept, is an anachronism - a throwback to the days when the Web was all about motion, and rarely about rest. In the days when every page, personal or corporate, was a "homepage," the common denominator was the hotlist, and every Web site felt compelled to carve its identity via a list of links. It made sense - before server-pushes, Java, and stylesheets, the most sophisticated Web technology was the href.
It still is. Too much so, in fact. By now, almost everybody realizes that traffic is the true global currency. Outside of bona fide homepages and Yahoo, most off-site links are ads, paid for by people who need more traffic in order to sell more traffic. The surreal mathematics of trafficking in traffic may become better understood and standardized, but they won't go away. Which creates a huge opportunity, a chance to reintroduce the connectedness the Web was originally created to enable. Thus Alexa - a new navigation service conceived by Brewster Kahle, inventor of WAIS and co-founder of Thinking Machines.
Ironically, while reminiscent of quite a few collaborative agent filtering sites, search engines, and bookmark-management schemes, Alexa is neither a Web site nor a plug-in, but an application that works in cooperation with your browser. It functions as a toolbar that presents an active analysis of every site you visit - who owns it, how many sites link to it, how many pages are on it, and how popular it is amongst other Alexa users. More importantly, it provides multiple suggestions for where to go next - based on which sites are similar, which sites others have fled to, and which sites others have linked it to. And, of course, who has paid Alexa to be included.
But don't fault them for the slight intrusion of commercialism. That's a given. What's more alarming is the fact that the ploy works, more or less. Some might be impressed by its instant-messaging add-on or its archive service, which strives to eliminate 404s forever, but these are merely equivalent to leather interiors and a rear spoiler, entirely tangential to the quality of the ride. Even in its infancy, with its current surf suggestions based not on user feedback but on more mundane technical comparisons, Alexa's pointers often make no sense at all, but are precise and impressive. It all adds up to a two-part puzzle: Will it take an application distinct from the browser itself to bring back the notion of motion? And if so, does anybody still want to surf?
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
