The half-genius of Marc Andreessen

The internet since first conceived in the late 1980s has been a place of innovation. There has been so much innovation that you’d think it would be hard to single out an innovator or innovation which stands out above the rest.

But there is one innovator and innovation, which is head and shoulders above the rest, notwithstanding the brilliance which continues to shape and re-shape the internet on a continuing basis.

I speak of Marc Andreessen and the graphical web browser. Sure there was the internet before Andreessen wrote Mosaic, and later, the Netscape browser. There was even a text browser but without graphics and images, there was not much to the web.

The internet BN (Before Netscape) hardly mattered relative to AN (After Netscape). A million websites were created and users poured onto the web to make and share content. Commerce flourished as a whole new endeavour of human activity took off in a big way.

The browser allowed users to access websites and web pages. As these proliferated web indexes of various kinds were set up to help users navigate their way from site to site to find the best stuff. Yahoo was an early index. Humans worked out hierarchical categories and indexed sites accordingly.

But the sites continued to proliferate and got too numerous to index. Computers were the obvious solution.

Early search engines emerged which provided returns based, for instance, on the number of times a requested keyword appeared on a page. This was better, but not good enough.

Then, hallelujah, along came Google. The idea here was simple, analyse the whole web in terms of how pages link to one another. The more links, the higher the page was ranked.

So Google, and its main competitors, put vast resources into crawling and indexing the web. Crawlers visit websites on a continual basis checking for updates. The crawled pages are then indexed on vast server farms.

There is much more these days to the way pages are indexed, the main engines adding all kinds of flavours to the basic vanilla described above. But the basic recipe is as above, the underlying principle being that huge resources are used to centralise masses of data.

The result is a hugely skewed market. Over one billion people actively produce and consume information on the web, writing, emailing, designing, posting and blogging, but just one company, Google, has been able to appropriate 80% of all revenues associated with the activity central to the current web, search.

That’s 80 cents for Google and 20 cents for the rest of us.

How did this arise? How did web users come to get so dependent on just one company that it has been able to extract such a large portion of this particular economic pie?

Could it be that Andreessen, for all his brilliance, got the story only half right?

As useful as the Netscape browser (and the clones it spawned) was, it has no intelligence, no system for valuing or ranking pages, and no way of retrieving browsed pages by keyword or ranking and no way of communicating these values to other users.

For an application which lives on a computer, it is a dumb thing. It makes no use of the masses of computing power now resident on every desktop, nor does it in any way access the power of a network of users.

Given that the browser lives on massive computing power and is connected to a mass of other computers with similarly impressive computing power, it is pretty unimpressive.

At best the browser provides limited memory of pages browsed and has no search or sharing capacity of its own.

With limited functionality, the browser soon lost its way. Search soared, browsing tanked. Google went stratospheric, Netscape collapsed. The browser has lost its way because it was conceived as a useful, but extremely limited tool, a way to read web content. Ranking and retrieving the value of the content was left to other devices, principally the aberration which came to be known as the search engine.

But what if the browser had intelligence? What if it had its own internal ranking mechanism for determining the value of a web page? What if it also had a mechanism for instantly and anonymously sharing these values with a large group of other users?

JiQA is such a browser. A download which runs on Windows .Net is available for beta users at www.jiqa.com