The Web, Apple, NeXT and the evolution of search

By Jonny Evans

While the Phandroid lobby echoes Google's one-sided plea for 'openness', spare a thought for the Worldwide Web which spawned all this innovation, and the NeXT seed of Apple [AAPL] CEO, Steve Jobs, which enabled the world's first-ever Web server, 20 years ago.

[ABOVE: An early NeXT-hosted Web page. c/o CERN.]

NeXT for the Web

August 6 marks the date the first-ever Web page went online, powered by the world's first-ever Web server, situated at http://info.cern.ch. Assembled by Sir Tim Berners-Lee using a NeXT computer, the browser was also an editor, enabling an interactive Web experience.

Unfortunately, with the exception of NeXT machines, most computers just weren't capable of handling all these features, which is why a browse-only Web was born. Who ran NeXT? Steve Jobs. It was his next step project after losing a battle for control of Apple, all those years ago.

The move to launch the first Web browser followed years of work at CERN, which celebrates March 9, 1989 as the official anniversary of the Web, it being the day when Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal".

It is interesting that Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer both as the server and as the tool with which to write the first browser. Not only did the NeXT architecture allow him to create an interactive experience which we didn't really see come to fruition for years online, but that experience had to be whittled down in order that other platforms could participate.

An Internet of things

That's the power of NeXT's Unix and object-oriented architecture. And that's still the power of NeXT in its now not-so-new role at the heart of OS X, and, of course, iOS. Just fifteen years ago Apple acquired NeXT, on December 20, 1996.

iOS is arguably Apple's biggest focus. Mobile is so critical to Apple strategy that I sometimes wonder which non-mobile-related Apple board meetings then Google CEO and Apple board member, Eric Schmidt, was actually able to attend. Perhaps we'll find out more about this when that Steve Jobs biography is published.

This month's Nature carries an article that's stingingly critical of Google's main business, Search. Entitled, "Search needs a shake-up" University of Washington scientist Oren Etzioni wrote that the main obstacle to progress in search: "...seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination."

He's a proponent of spoken word search. "More and more, we're going to be accessing the Web through mobile devices with tiny screens," he said in a release. "As you do more and more of that, it becomes harder and harder to type in keywords and see long lists of blue links."

"People are going to be clamoring for more intelligent search and a more streamlined process of asking questions and getting answers," he said.

Tools already exist for this. Etzioni's pushing open-source tool, ReVerb, which takes a step beyond text-based search to one in which it identifies objects, people, places, things, and attempts to uncover relationships between them. You can try some sample searches here.

A new chapter for search

All the signs show the Web is becoming an augmented reality solution. We see hints of this everywhere: Google Maps, various assistance apps, translation engines, the evolution of leading operating systems...

This future direction clearly includes location-based data that's responsive to a user's needs; it encompasses voice search and will one day become sufficiently intelligent to predict a user's needs before the user knows them themselves.

I guess I'm saying that this August 6, the anniversary of the world's first Web browser we should also spare a thought for a change in the way we will browse the Web in future. We'll use apps. We'll use intelligent assistants, such as the Apple-acquired Siri.

Apple's advantages in mobile and on the desktop are being combined. In future some anticipate the difference between the iOS and OS X to disappear and for both operating systems to become unified. That's by no means beyond the pale, given both share the same basic roots.

Evolve, or die

Given that the Web is becoming ever more critical to the implementation of today's desktop, notebook and mobile solutions, then we should consider the next step evolution of search as a big deal.

(Can anyone else recall the ever-enigmatic Steve Jobs, when he said of his company's relationship with Google, "We didn't enter the search business, they entered the phone business. Google wants to kill the iPhone - we won't let them.")

A huge weight of historical and technological imperatives mean search is changing.

It will be interesting to see which of Google's competitors manage to first embrace that change.

And also how deeply Google will be able to respond, given so much of its income still comes from text-based ads in search results and on conventional websites. In an information-centric age, will people want ads muddying up their search results, particularly if delivered by speech?

Share and share alike

Like the Web, search is a child. It will continue to evolve. The way we interrogate search engines will become more important than the search engine itself.

Ultimately our intelligent assistants will query all available data sources (Google, Yahoo, Bing, you name it) to assess the best and most accurate response to any spoken question. There's no need to build the search data, it already exists, it's about how we navigate that information.

With this in mind it will be interesting to see if Google will be willing to enable this next step evolution of information technology by sharing its own search algorithms, data collections and patented search technologies freely with competitors at no cost. This is what it seems to expect from its competitors in order to enable its own adventures in mobile, after all, in its complaint that 'hostile' patent holders (Translation: everyone in the smartphone biz apart from Google) are attempting to hamper Android evolution.

Your thoughts?

Please do follow me on Twitter so I can let you know when I post new reports here at Computerworld.