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[…] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine [Google] that is transparent and in the academic realm.
— Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Funny to think that this statement is from the founders of the company who makes most of its money through advertisement 🙂
I just came by an explanation of the origin of the phrase “browsing [the web]”, which I thought was interesting because usually one never really thinks about something like this. In their article “Online text retrieval via browsing”, Cove and Walsh (1988) explain its origin as follows:
The term “browsing” is usually applied to the actions of moving about a library and dipping into books, picking out bits and pieces of information of all kinds. The term is derived from the eating behavior of deer when selecting the fresh young shoots, and thus carries the connotation of selecting worthwhile and useful information.