After the third generation of programmable information processing devices became cheap enough for home use by a significant amount of the population in the northern hemisphere in the 1980s, the 1990s saw an exponential increase in the networking of these devices. These first attempts at permanently linking these discrete devices were mostly done using a system of wires, above- or underground, spanning seas and continents. A radio-based infrastructure was being built, but was not yet ready for handling the needs of the users.

It was possible for users on this network to retrieve information from connected devices using a known protocol. Part of this protocol was that the pieces of information, files, would contain pointers to other files, thus creating a conceptual network on linked information, the World Wide Web. Some devices on this network were devoted to indexing this web to allow people to find things. A famous one was called AltaVista. Even though it was considered one of the most prolific indexing systems, estimated was that AltaVista never indexed more than 20% of the World Wide Web. Even so, the index it built is probably quite a good representation of the text files available on the web.

On December 31, 1999 17:57 EST, I entered the following terms into AltaVista to count how many files contained the entry.

Term Estimated number of files found ----------------------------------------------- love 8,172,434 hate 613,190 war 4,508,461 peace 1,597,190 god 3,812,950 money 7,386,771

sex 19,455,945

FJ!!