Solid (web decentralization project)
Two decades after Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he outlined the design issues of what later became the Solid project in drafts he wrote for the World Wide Web Consortium. Berners-Lee became increasingly dismayed at seeing his invention being abused, such as when Russian hackers allegedly interfered with the 2016 US elections, when the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal became public, when Facebook in 2012 conducted psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users in secret, and when Google and Amazon applied for patents on devices that listen for emotional changes in human voices.
World Wide Web Wanderer
The World Wide Web Wanderer, also referred to as just the Wanderer, was a Perl-based web crawler that was first deployed in June 1993 to measure the size of the World Wide Web. The Wanderer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Matthew Gray, who, as of 2017, has spent a decade as a software engineer at Google. The crawler was used to generate an index called the "Wandex" later in 1993. While the Wanderer was probably the first web robot, and, with its index, clearly had the potential to become a general-purpose WWW search engine, the author does not make this claim and elsewhere it is stated that this was not its purpose. The Wanderer charted the growth of the web until late 1995.