Once the article had appeared and everyone had recycled their copies, I put an HTML version of it into my personal Web space. It was two levels deep: one had to first access my home page, then a page talking about my interests in the social implications of computing, and only then would one find a link to the article. I expected that only a few people would find and read it.
The access logs on my server are browsable; I can easily pick out the times when and locations from which any given page of mine is being accessed. To my surprise, that page started getting a large number of accesses (up to a thousand a month) in late spring 1995. While this is nothing in the larger context of the Web, this file was by far the most popular on my server. The hits were coming from all around the world, from Korea, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Alaska. None of these people were accessing my main home page; they were jumping directly to the article, and only to the article.
My conclusion was that someone's Web page was pointing at my essay, with a recommendation to read it. There seemed to be no way to find out who was making this recommendation. I did two things in response. First, I added a link at the beginning of the essay back to my home page (previously, I had thought this unnecessary, since I couldn't imagine anyone getting there without going through that page). Second, I looked at the access logs to see if I could identify the individuals requesting the essay. Although their home machines were identified, most people were listed with user ID "unknown". But a few were not. I sent electronic mail to those few people, asking them how they had found my essay.
I continued to monitor the access logs. Of those people who followed the back link to my home page, most went to look at pictures of my second child (born in March 1995) before leaving my Web page, presumably forever. Could these ordinary images, these domestic snapshots, be metaphors for something missing from the Internet, something that peripatetic browsers explicitly seek?
I finally received enough e-mail to figure out the reason for all those accesses. Netscape is one of the most popular Web browsers, accounting for more than half of all Web accesses in spring 1995. There was a row of buttons on the version current at that time; one was labelled Net Search. Clicking it brought up a page created by the developers of Netscape which talked about various methods of searching the Web. The page contained one form which allowed a free submission of a search request to InfoSeek, a commercial search service that was offering a sample of ten hits in response to any search string, in order to solicit business.
Using the word "newsgroups" gave one ten pages using that word, with a promise of two hundred more when the appropriate fee was paid. My essay was page #2. I suspect that most of the accesses to my five-thousand-word essay (which are continuing as I write this in September 1995) are due to people trying to figure out how to read newsgroups through Netscape; few if any of them are bothering to read it.