When the web first rose to popularity in the 1990s, people spoke of browsing or surfing the web, and users located interesting sites primarily by finding and clicking on links listed on major web directory sites like Yahoo! and Netscape. As the size of the web has exploded over the past decade (Google now indexes well over twenty billion web pages), browsing through sites by following web links has become an increasingly inefficient means to initiate a search for new or very specific information. You may still browse the home page of the New York Times or a personal portal page like iGoogle or MyYahoo!, but if you need anything more specific, you will probably go straight to a search engine such as Google.