By 2001, more than half of American house-holds had subscribed to an Internet service.

Wikipedia was similarly showcasing the power of collaborative communities toproduce compelling material

Netflix, together with competitors such as Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, havechanged the way people watch television. Cable television subscriptions peaked in2012 before beginning a gradual decline, and disc sales have dropped faster.5

As Internet connections grew faster, more users shifted to purchasing software viadownloads rather than on disc. Software companies eventually moved away entirelyfrom the model of selling major releases every few years

Companies spent a huge amount maintaining their own server farms, most ofit not for hardware but for IT staff, backup and disaster recovery capabilities, and so on.Cloud services could spread those costs over many users, making computing more effi-cient and manageable.

Companies set upfarms of servers running Web applications, with a load balancing system to route eachnew request to the least busy server. Storage area networks provided ultra-high-speedconnections between servers and disk pools. The technological lines separating main-frames, minicomputers, and personal computers were starting to blur

The bigger point here is that Microsoft was never able to turn the Web into a pro-prietary system because it couldn’t match its domination of the browser side of theWeb with similar control over the servers that generated Web pages.

icrosoft preinstalledInternet Explorer on every computer, making it the default choice. It forced PC com-panies to stop distributing Netscape on their computers, and it made a deal with AOLto make Internet Explorer the default browser for its customers.

Advertisers entered bids online to display their ads when particular terms weresearched for. Google copied this idea and its pay-per-click model, in which advertisersare paid only when a viewer clicks an advertisement, from an Internet advertising pio-neer called Overture.com. In deciding which ads to display, Google’s algorithms fac-tored in how often advertisements were clicked on as well as the amount bid by theadvertiser

In 2000, it began selling advertisements, with an approach it called AdWords

Instead of subscriptions or micropayments, the economics of Web publishing devel-oped around advertising. The publisher would receive a tiny payment for each pagedisplayed, but from an advertiser rather than the reader

Google,founded by Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who were then graduate students in Stanford’scomputer science program

the most successful of these, wasfounded in 1994 by Stanford University students Dave Filo and Jerry Yang as Jerry’sGuide to the World Wide Web.

The word browser captures the way that Berners-Lee expected people to use his cre-ation: clicking links from one page to another was like browsing a market from onestall to the next.

Enthusiasts opened cybercafes with Internet-connectedcomputers, an Atlas of Cyberspace was published, and the US government agreed not toforce the collection of sales tax on online purchases made across state lines.2

Although the estab-lished Internet Relay Chat system, for exchanging real-time messages in chat roomsproved popular, other consumer-oriented messaging systems sprang up

“Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServeare all suddenly obsolete—and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world’s stan-dard interface. . . . The global network of hypertext is no longer just a very cool idea.”

Gopherallowed students and faculty to easily locate information such as class schedules,administrative policy statements, and sporting events.

The Internet of the early 1990s was growing so rapidly that even experts found it hardto stay on top of its expanding collection of tools, protocols, file transfer sites, telnetservices, and newsgroups. It began to feel like a large library that had no card catalog

to situate thathistory firmly within the broader stories of the Internet and of computing

All the portals suffered from the classic business mistake ofveering from their core mission

Excite was the first search engine to transcend classickeyword-based searching with technology that grouped Web pagesby their underlying concepts.

The company's original goal was to createsearch technology for large databases within corporations, butKhosla encouraged the company to focus on the consumer Web

Lycos introduced Web page sum-maries in search results, rather than a simple list of link

cornerstone of Lycos's technique was analysis of anchortext, or the descriptions of outbound links on a Web page, to get abetter idea of the meaning of the existing page.

in 1996, it was impossible to create a pure play insearch that was economically viable. The market was still too imma-ture-robust business models were years from fruition.

Everyone who used it loved it. Butwhen Monier sought approval to release his engine to the public,DEC execs scratched their heads. What good was a search enginewhen it came to selling hardware

First is the crawl (or spider), whichgathers every possible page on the Web. Second is the index, themassive database created by that crawl. And the third comprises theuser interface and search software,

Xerox

Then, of course, there's the lottery play: theoretically, pure researchallows for great leaps forward, leaps that may contain within them thespark of a hundred-billion-dollar opportunity. Not that that's thestated purpose of pure research, of course.

As is true for much of the IT industry, nearly every well-knowncompany in search can trace its roots to a university, the kind of in-stitution that allows big ideas to flourish without the straitjacket ofcommercial demands.

WebCrawler opened up a new universe for Web surfers, particu-larly at AOL. Its full-text search and simple browser-based interfacewas an important step toward making the Web fit for mainstreamconsumption, beyond academics and tech geeks

WebCrawler was important to the evolution of search because itwas the first to index the full text of the Web documents it found.

bandwidth was at a premium, andmany Webmasters felt the Wanderer ate up too many processingand bandwidth cycles as it indexed a site's contents.

fu the Web took off, so did the basic problem of search.