NPR.

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma.

Today we've got a special guest episode for you.

It's an excerpt from a series called Who Broke the Internet from our colleagues up north

at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It's from their understood feed at CBC Podcasts, and the host is

Corey Doctoroe. You might have heard of him? He's a journalist, blogger, science fiction writer, and

internet commentator. And his series digs into his criticisms on the state of the modern internet

and what we can do about it.

So in this excerpt you're going to hear after the break,

Corey's going to talk about how search engines got started.

Eventually, the internet got too big for people to know where everything was, so waves of clever people created search engines.

Early search engines just looked for pages containing the words you typed,

giving priority to pages that contained more of those words.

This worked okay, but when it failed, boy, did it ever fail badly.

If you wanted your page to rate high on the search results for a query like Mexican food,

you could keyword stuff it by adding the words Mexican food

a thousand times in tiny white-on-white type to the bottom of the page.

The primitive search engines would count these all up and conclude that your page was the most

important Mexican food resource in the world, which is useless because most hungry people

aren't looking for a site that just has the words Mexican food a thousand times.

To weed these bad hits out of your search results, you'd have to master all kinds of arcane

search engine syntax so you could exclude words and phrases, putting minus signs in front of

...