The impact of Internet technologies

For billions of people around the world, the Internet has become an essential component of their everyday social and business lives. And though they seldom give it a moment’s thought, the search engines that help them navigate through the plethora of pages, images, video clips, and audio recordings found on the World Wide Web have also become essential. Search technology—shortened simply to “search” in the IT world and referred to as such in the rest of this report—is only two decades old, but it is a cornerstone of the Internet economy. The numbers prove its utility. In 2010, an average Internet user in the United States performed some 1,500 searches, while some 1.6 trillion searches a year are conducted globally.