Over the last 20 years, the World Wide Web has grown from a modest research project into an immense, seemingly chaotic repository of information and a novel, wide-ranging medium of communication.
It’s also an intriguing type of network because it wasn’t explicitly engineered, unlike the electric power grid or telephone system of the past. The Web is the sum of billions of interconnected “pages,” created by the uncoordinated actions of tens of millions of individuals.