Aside from the collaborative aspect of the new Internet there is another reason the Web has earned its 2.0 upgrade. The user’s interaction, not with other users, but with the interface of the Net itself has changed significantly. Technical advancements in web navigation and design, as well as increased penetration of high-speed and broadband connection, make the new Web a foreign landscape compared to its older version. Web applications have continued to improve providing a profoundly different user experience. The implementation of rich internet applications (RIA) is gaining ground. RIA technologies, such as Flash, Ajax, and Java, are leading the Internet in the direction of a Web without web pages. Websites are traditionally made up of a network of static pages that are linked together by text in the form of the computer language HTML. These pages behave in a synchronous manner. That is, after the user clicks on a link, there is a short period while the server processes the input, in turn triggering the browser to download the requested page. RIA operates in an asynchronous fashion allowing response time to be much faster. RIAs increased responsiveness occurs due to the following five reasons:
- Information can be obtained from a server by anticipating certain user input
- The screen can be refreshed in pieces instead of all at once, eliminating the need for entirely different pages to load when navigating content.
- More than one user input can be collected and validated before it is sent to the server.
- Some responses to user input can take place without any server communication.
- Certain processing that was once dealt with on the server end can be stored on the user desktop.
Google Maps is a prime example of the pageless capabilities intrinsic in RIAs, such as Ajax, that are disrupting the crawlability of the Web. Search engines rely on crawling and indexing pages that have unique URL addresses. Websites built using RIAs not only function without the constant reloading of pages, but in most cases do not require unique URLs. Growing implementation of RIA has important implications on search engines and optimizers alike.