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.
ProQuest Dialog
Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dialog system was completed in 1966 under the direction of Roger K. Summit. According to its literature, it was "the world's first online information retrieval system to be used globally with materially significant databases". In the 1980s, a low-priced dial-up version of a subset of Dialog was marketed to individual users as "Knowledge Index". This subset included INSPEC, MathSciNet, over 200 other bibliographic and reference databases, as well as third-party retrieval vendors who would go to physical libraries to copy materials for a fee and send it to the service subscriber.