Web navigation
Web navigation came about with the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1989 when Timothy Berners-Lee invented it. Once the world wide web was available, web navigation increasingly became a major aspect and role in jobs and everyday lives. With one-third of the world’s population now using the internet, web navigation maintains a global use in today's ever evolving international society. Web navigation is not restricted to just computers, either, as mobile phones and tablets have added avenues for access to the ever-growing information on the web today. The most recent wave of technology which has affected web navigation is the introduction and growth of the smartphone. As of January 2014, 58% of American adults owned a smart phone, and that number is on the rise from previous years. Web navigation has evolved from a restricted action, to something that many people across the world now do on a daily basis.
World Wide Web Wanderer
The World Wide Web Wanderer, also referred to as just the Wanderer, was a Perl-based web crawler that was first deployed in June 1993 to measure the size of the World Wide Web. The Wanderer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Matthew Gray, who, as of 2017, has spent a decade as a software engineer at Google. The crawler was used to generate an index called the "Wandex" later in 1993. While the Wanderer was probably the first web robot, and, with its index, clearly had the potential to become a general-purpose WWW search engine, the author does not make this claim and elsewhere it is stated that this was not its purpose. The Wanderer charted the growth of the web until late 1995.