There are two main themes in the development of the internet. I name them quantity, connections, and order. When the internet first came into birth, it was intended to facilitate the information exchange among the researchers and scientists among the world, specifically those in the Europe. There was not much content, and if we regard websites as spots, they were quite separated with no connections between them. At that age, it’s almost impossible to reach the content you want in the internet and personal websites function similarly as business cards, only passed between acquaintances with face-to-face contact. But still, people were passionate about the democracy underlying the internet hat everyone is allowed to create and publish without any censorship from the central government, at least at the beginning. The magnitude of all variety of materials online was increasing rapidly in the first few years. The first theme, quantity, was not a big problem even a decade ago. However, limited to the absence of an effective way to find the content desired and ways to reach each other, the internet reached a bottleneck, which stayed unsolved until the invention of Google.

When we are surfing online and try to find something, the first website that comes to our mind is Google. It has become so permeable that people almost forget that Google was not born with the internet. Before Google, the internet was just like the earth on the great voyage of Columbus, that people were all over the world without even knowing each other, same as the web. Though there had been a considerable amount of content there and several groups were formed, the connections between them were still too weak to create some collisions of ideas. The birth of Google connects all of them together. Since then, people can find whatever they want as long as they know the correct keywords related. The small “tribes” among the internet universe started to realize each other, and the bridges between them were further increased and strengthened. The chaotic virtual world began to form an order.

However, it is still not good enough. The Google has become a legend and solved many connections problem on the internet. But there is one fatal flaw here—people need to know the accurate keyword to get access to the content they want, which needs not only a pre-assumed proficiency of the field they’re trying to investigate and internet literacy to make it function properly. Yes, for most of us, what we want is already there on the web, and there are connections for us to reach it, but it can still take a considerable amount of time to locate it. In research, getting overwhelmed in the sea of scholarly resources is very common, even with a significant amount of terminologies and carefully designed categories. With the fact that people still need pre-knowledge to get to other places on the internet, the isolation property of internet is still there and needs far more work needed to be done.