Nearly two decades ago, on Christmas Day 1990, Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the World Wide Web when he connected two computers using HTTP via the Internet. I am not quite sure where Al Gore was that day, but at that point, the Internet was in place. Now, 18 years later, the World Wide Web consists of some 15 billion pages. Considering there are only something like 6.8 billion people on the planet–most of whom have no access to the World Wide Web–that is a truly astonishing number.

A couple of years ago, Sir Berners-Lee joined forces with Nigel Shadbolt–professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton–to try to understand the phenomenal growth of the Web and find ways to control and use the Web in meaningful ways. Together, they and their respective universities created a new discipline they call Web science. "The Web Science Research Initiative will allow researchers to take the Web seriously as an object of scientific inquiry, with the goal of helping to foster the Web's growth and fulfill its great potential as a powerful tool for humanity," according to an MIT press release dated Nov. 2, 2006.

The notion the Web can be studied as an object of scientific inquiry is not new. Google and other search providers have been doing that for years. In fact, the amount of time and effort spent developing search and relevancy algorithms is phenomenal. What is new is the idea the Web can or should be controlled and directed to "fulfill its potential." The seemingly random growth of the Web is what makes it so interesting and attractive. The very randomness of content displayed on the Web is what necessitated the development of search and ranking engines in the first place. In fact, one could argue, search engines have made the Web what it is today.