Over the past two decades, surfing the World Wide Web has become an important
pastime for many former couch potatoes. The increasing popularity of the Internet
during the 1990 s convinced several e-commerce companies, principal among them
AOL and Yahoo!, to establish massive websites intended to serve as “portals” to the
Internet. These Internet portals were designed to “capture” Internet users when they
went online and then direct them to the specific entertainment, business, sports, or
other sites that they wanted to visit. AOL, Yahoo!, and their competitors expected to
produce huge revenue streams by selling advertising on their portal websites to the
large number of companies that wanted to market their products and services to Internet
users who typically have deeper pockets than the average consumer.