Imagine trying to find a book in in Library of Congress without the aid of a card catalog. It would be next to impossible. That’s the problem people faced in their initial efforts to find information on the World Wide Web. And that’s what created the demand for another software program: the search engine. In rapid succession, a number of programs with catchy names such as Yahoo!, Excite, and InfoSeek emerged to act as search engines for the cyberspace traveler. The user could simply type in a name, a word or a phrase, and the search engine would scour the Net for relevant information and website addresses.