Tim Bray resurrects a presentation he gave in May, 1996 entitled “Measuring the Web.”
A worthy part of history, and now it will be preserved in various caches for… well, a long time. Some of the sites named are long gone, and no longer well known. Infoseek, for example, where I interviewed in December, 1996, when it was a rising star. Infoseek’s location, a 45 minute drive from San Francisco at off-peak hours, ruled it out by the time I arrived at the building. Some things work out for the best!
In the presentation, there are two tidbits I’m curious about that don’t get explained in Figure 7, Most Lumous Sites (those that link out). The right-hand side of the graph is titled Sites With Pointers from: x1000. The second largest site, after Yahoo, is listed only as an IP address: 197.160.127.201 I wonder what that site was? A reverse DNS lookup tells me nothing, since DNSStuff.com says Asking f.root-servers.net for 201.127.160.197.in-addr.arpa PTR record: Sorry, there is no such zone! On the left-hand side of the graph, Outgoing URLs, x1000, there is a different IP address just over halfway down: 198.147.102.253 Looking that one up via reverse DNS gets caught in a loop, so I’m going to have to remain curious for both of them, or hope that Bray remembers what they might have been and provides an update.
Some of the graphics carry a lot of information, despite their somewhat crude edges. I expect Matthew Hurst would have fun with the original data set (if it still existed), given what he’s showing in exercises like his map of the blogosphere. These pictures don’t always convey all we’d hope, but more fun than words, and visually appealing, too. I have Tufte’s newest, Beautiful Evidence, on order from Amazon. I can’t make beautiful or information-full pictures, but I do enjoy poring over them.
If you do find the written history of technology appealing, don’t forget about How the Web Was Born.