  Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos |
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"There's a little-known turning point to the popularity of the Web," Tim Bray told us. "And that's the day [in 1994] when FedEx put up parcel tracking on the W3. Every business person in the world got it right then and there. It was one of those powerful moments that illuminated the usefulness of this new medium."
Amazon.com. Expedia. eBay. In 1995, companies began to launch corporate Web sites and e-commerce portals in rapid succession (as evidenced in our timeline). Buoyed by a strong economy, the consuming public began to respond in force. Now every major corporation has a Web presence of some sort, and hundreds of thousands of online shops allow consumers to purchase goods electronically.
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 Introduction WWW: Past, Present, And Future• Beginnings • The Web Debuts • Better Browsers, New Media • E-Commerce And Search • Self-Expression Ascendant Browser Wars: The Saga Continues The Skinny On Web 2.0 WWW Pop-Up Timeline Browser Image Gallery |
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Another company whose success is similarly important, perhaps even more so when viewed from a sociological perspective, is eBay. The company's instantly profitable launch opened everyone's eyes to the power of used goods and collectibles -- not to mention the thrill of bidding for products online.
Finally, during this period of Web expansion, a number of Web sites emphasizing services rather than marketing or commerce began to emerge. Hotmail is one of the most prominent examples -- developers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith created a Web-based e-mail system that severed users' reliance upon Internet service providers for e-mail addresses and e-mail access.
Enter The Search Engine
Sorting, scanning, and scouring the Web via search engines such as Google seems like a no-brainer today. How else are we to find and explore the millions of content entries on the Web?
 Jerry Yang, of "Jerry's Guide" and Yahoo fame |
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A number of Internet-based search programs, such as Archie, Gopher, Veronica, and Jughead (some of which predated the Web), were available for searching non-Web content. As the number of Web sites began to grow exponentially, both in the number of available sites and the level of public interest, one thing became clear to people like Tim Bray: Users of the World Wide Web desperately needed similar tools to quickly sort, categorize, and search the ever-growing amount of information.
"In 1994, I was at a conference and this guy started talking about how important search engines and functionality would be," Bray related. "I had just helped put up Open Text, one of the Web's first search engines, and I remember thinking that this would be a key future element of the World Wide Web."
Hundreds of individuals and corporations also felt this way. Starting in 1994, a number of search engines were launched: WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, AltaVista -- and, of course, Yahoo and Google. And the rest is history: In terms of its relative importance to the growth of the Web, search is probably second only to the Web browser itself.
