Information Management: A Proposal
Tim Berners-Lee · 1989
"A linked hypertext system over a network would let information at CERN (and everywhere) be shared without central control."
CERN had a chronic problem: it was a research institution with constant staff turnover, and critical technical knowledge kept disappearing when people left because there was no consistent way to link related documents together. Berners-Lee proposed a system of 'hypertext' — documents containing links that point to other documents, regardless of what computer or format they lived on — accessible over CERN's internal network. The specific institutional problem was narrow, but the solution he designed had no reason to stay narrow: a linked, decentralized information system.
Read more about the topic
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
"Ranking web pages by the link structure of the web itself (PageRank) produces dramatically better search than keyword matching."