I first used the World Wide Web in 1996 I think. Most of the sites had gray background with just text and occasional images. I used to visit a lot of sites covering programming and tweaking Windows 95 and I always ended up getting some information which sparked me to write a new utility or something.
My habits haven't changed much but the WWW has. Just a few minutes back I came across an article named 'The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time' and thought that it might be an interesting read. I clicked on the link from Google and was first greeted by a full-page advertisement. OK, I clicked 'continue to PC-World' and I was shown the article. It was interesting to see that almost 50% of the page contains advertisements. The article itself has been broken down into multiple pages perhaps because it maximizes the number of advertisements that can be shown. What really did it was when I clicked 'Next Page' I was shown the same full page advertisement again. Promptly, having closed the browser-tab I'm now writing this.
Now-a-days I still read online but don't find enough worthwhile stuff. When I do come across an interesting bit of information, it's accompanied by a lot distracting stuff. To top it all companies like Amazon and Google seem to track my shopping list and keep peppering items from my wish list on almost all the websites.
What ever happened to the beautiful Internet?