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World Wide Web casting bigger information network

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WELL, we all know how popular the World Wide Web (WWW) is. It cannot be denied.

The number of pages on this massive collection of hypertext-linked web pages grows at amazing rates, especially when one looks at the resources being poured into providing methods of finding information on the Web.

Take a look just at the NCSA What's New Page.

NCSA, the pioneer that created the original free version of Mosaic, maintains a monthly listing of new pages. The list is getting to be massive and it signals the diversity of the WWW, especially when one considers that the What's New page there probably fails to list many of the new pages which come into existence each month.

Of course, unlike Gopher and FTP (file transfer protocol) which both have time-tested methods of searching for data and extensive lists of resources compiled by all sorts of topics, the WWW is more in its infancy, even if its growth appears accelerated by some type of growth hormone similar to what they feed to some cows to induce increased milk production.

Increasingly there are places to search to find just the right information on the Web. Of course, NCSA and its What's New page is a good place to find the latest information about what is on offer. But, the What's New page is not all that is available to find just the right web page.

The most interesting of the Web searching resources, in fact, are not static lists of information such as NCSA's What's New page. They are based on robots which can automatically scan the Net for new WWW pages and, in that way, maintain a database of Web pages without actually requiring manual registration of new pages.

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