Back in my day, we didn't have Google. In fact, that's probably true for you readers as well. It's hard to remember now, but indeed there was an Internet (back then, it was so novel that people capitalized it) before Google. In order to reflect on how the Internet has changed, one has to start off by talking about what it was and, at its heart, still is.
Although most people prefer the term "website" now, the name "Web page" is somewhat more indicative of what the Internet actually consists of. The originating idea behind the Internet was simply a bunch of pages with links to each other. This concept is known as hypertext, which is what the HT in HTML stands for. Of course, people quickly caught on that you could provide links not just to other pages, but to media and documents as well.
However, the big game changer was the idea of "linking" to another computer. Whereas the very beginnings of hypertext were like having a research paper with an index, the idea of using multiple computers was the equivalent of having all the research papers ever written organized by who cited whom.
Given this pile of papers, though, you'd probably have no idea where to start. Well, the original solution didn't completely solve the problem, but it helped. Every computer was assigned a name. At first this name was a number (IP address) but that system proved to be unscalable. The system of domain names was invented, which basically meant that if you typed in a name, the computer automatically found the corresponding number and sent you there. To this day, typing "www.google.com" directs your computer to go to 72.14.204.103.
Although you probably think of a computer as something on which to browse the Internet and a server as something to contain the Internet, a server is in reality just a computer. Likewise, when you connect to the Internet, your computer gets an IP address just like a server does. Although this functionality is turned off by default on home computers, it is possible to host a website from your own computer.
However, your computer doesn't have a name like a server does, just an IP address. More importantly, your computer isn't always connected to the Internet like a server. It's important to note that an IP address is assigned to an Internet connection, not a computer. This means that every time you connect to the Internet, you have, contrary to popular belief, a different IP address. Don't go and illegally download Bridesmaids just yet, though — there are ways to identify specific computers on the Internet. I'm too lazy to write about how that works, though, so Google it.
Speaking of Google, how's that work? Well in short, Google contains the Internet. Really. Google programs have looked at every known server and followed every link, downloading the Internet. When you search for "Tufts Dars" (if you don't know what that is already, trust me, Google it), Google looks through its copy of the Internet for all text containing those words. The closer those words appear to each other on a page and the more popular the page is, the higher up the page is on your list. For every page on the list, Google provides you the link of where it downloaded its copy.
Luckily, servers can tell Google not to copy the private parts of a site. The cool thing is that some websites do this for the entire site; you can't find them through Google, only through knowing their address. The collection of these sites is known as the Deep Web.
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Ben Schwalb is a member of the class of 2012 who majored in computer science. He can be reached at Benjamin.Schwalb@tufts.edu.
