  The first Web site was developed in 1991 (at the CERN European laboratory for particle physics) by Tim Berners-Lee, who also founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT in 1994. The World Wide Web was based on the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and used a format called the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for designing and delivering documents; many non-technical users found navigating the Web to be much more friendly and versatile than using GOPHER and FTP to exchange files. For the (HTTP-based) Web to realize its full potential and to become attractive to non-technical users, however, a more intuitive user interface was needed. The Mosaic Web browser (later called Netscape Navigator) became available in 1993 and was the first Internet application to include a graphical user interface (GUI); this interface, with its intuitive features that enabled users to click on hyperlinks, made navigating the Web much easier for non-technical users. Although Netscape Navigator was a Web browser, and not a search engine, it provided a forum in which many specialized Web search engine companies were able to flourish. A host of search engines, most of which were dedicated to specific areas or specific kinds of searches, soon became available. Some search engines that were especially popular during this period were Excite (introduced in 1993) and Lycos and Infoseek (both of which were available in 1994). Others included Looksmart and Alta Vista, introduced in 1995, and Ask.com (originally called AskJeeves) in 1997 (Wall 2011).