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'Trailblazers' Forces Contestants to Surf the Web the 'Classic Way'

by Amar Toor on August 10, 2010 at 03:50 PM

overhead image of 'trailblazers' competitors
You think you know the Internet. You can dart from one page to another with the greatest of ease, and are supremely confident in your search engine acumen. But what if your digital field of vision suddenly shrank? What if you found yourself hermetically trapped on one measly website, and you had to worm your way to a completely different page at the other end of the Web?

That's exactly the challenge a group of contestants faced at this month's Trailblazers competition, an event created by German design student Theo Seeman. As the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal explains, each Trailblazing participant began at a given website, and had to click their way to another, pre-determined page. A counter kept track of each user's clicks, and whoever successfully navigated their way to the final page in the fewest number of clicks was crowned champion. Sounds easy, right? Thing is, search engines are off limits, as are address bars. Even keyboards are considered contraband. The only way to leave a page, then, is to click on links embedded directly on that particular site -- what event organizers call "the classic way" to surf the Web.

If you want to watch these bleary-eyed browsers in action, check out the video below from the latest event. It has a pretty depressing, Vegas-casino-at-2-p.m. feel to it, but, if you think you have what it takes to dig your way through the Web like a click-hungry mole, you can go ahead and book your ticket to ARS Electronica in Austria, where the next installment of Trailblazers will be held in September. [From: The Atlantic]

Tags: ArsElectronica, browser, competition, Internet, race, top, TrailBlazer, Web, website

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