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.
History of the Internet
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and information. Projects such as Archie, Gopher, WAIS, and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. In the early 1990s, Gopher, invented by Mark P. McCahill offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web. However, in 1993 the World Wide Web saw many advances to indexing and ease of access through search engines, which often neglected Gopher and Gopherspace. As popularity increased through ease of use, investment incentives also grew until in the middle of 1994 the WWW's popularity gained the upper hand. Then it became clear that Gopher and the other projects were doomed fall short.