Talk about a blast from the past, when I found this article that had content dating back to the mid 90’s, I found myself reminiscing a bit. The bulk of the article seems to encompass the belief that the Web is not that navigable.

This leads me to wonder what your thoughts are? I think that with Google and RSS feeds, this has changed drastically over time. What do you think? Am I missing the point or am I right on the nose?

When using the World Wide Web, how often do you attempt to navigate from the page that you’re currently browsing to some interesting and related, but hypothetical page? If you’re browsing a page about object-oriented design, will you attempt to navigate to a page about programming language theory? Probably not. As we have all learned (or taken for simple fact), the web is not a navigable structure: from any given “node”, there is really no way to know which outgoing link to follow to achieve the goal of reaching another node. Such a link may not even exist. So, are we forever doomed to the world of the search engine? We hope not. One potential solution is that of concept-based navigation: rather than navigating in Web-space, following only user-provided pointers, we advocate navigating through a space of concepts. These concepts characterize Web pages and point the user back into Web-space.