What are the examples of the best software on the Web--the software that's made it what it is today? It's not an easy question.Take GoTo, for example. It wasn't great software. It was a search engine that based its first page results on someone's willingness to pay to be there. To many of us at the time, including advertising in search results was corrupt. GoTo's paid results blended in with all the other results. Search was supposed to be objective but GoTo represented how money talks.

An earlier 1996 attempt at implementing this pay-for-placement search, Open Text, had been severely criticized by users of the Web, and it withered under the barrage.

Louis Monier, an early search researcher, now at Google, was among those who felt the Web should be true to its original purpose, the sharing of objective, academic research and researcher-to-researcher communications. "I was enormously opposed" to the pay-for-placement approach, he recalled in a recent interview.

GoTo did not become an overwhelming success, but it never quite died either. It migrated into Overture Inc., which at a much later point in the Web's history, had the wherewithal to purchase a really great search engine, AltaVista.

Monier was the early architect of AltaVista. This is an example of what I call the Web paradox. Some of its outcomes are completely unpredictable. In 1990-91, the Web represented a much less sophisticated computing platform than many that lay around it as it emerged out of the CERN research center in Geneva. The computing experts didn't understand it. The enterprise IT managers misjudged what it represented. The Web's asynchronous communications were judged hopelessly inferior to the more adroit synchronous email systems and system-to-system message transfers as represented by IBM's MQ Series. The Web's statelessness seemed to always leave it in a constant state of ignorance. It never seemed to know who its users were, where they were or what they needed next, compared to the enterprise client/server systems of the time.

But simplicity has its virtues. In order to move forward, advanced messaging, information distribution and collaborative systems had to endure the Web paradox and take a step backward, then start moving forward again. My article, Greatest Web Software Ever Written, presents my list of 12 programs which constitute the first crop of great software on the Web. I'm eager to know what you think of them: Whether you agree with my choices, and what programs you would have picked.