Shopping around the internet today and tomorrow: towards the millennium of cybermedicine

The evolution of the "information age" in medicine is mirrored in the exponential growth of medical web pages, increasing numbers of databases accessible on line, and expanding services and publications available on the internet, The handful of computers linked by the predecessor of the internet in 1969 has grown to more than 5 million websites today. In spring 1998, the world wide web had at least 320 million web pages of general content.(1) In addition, there are countless conversational areas on the internet, like that rooms and newsgroups, where people exchange messages on tens of thousands of subjects, Somewhere more than 150 million people currently communicate over the Internet(2) According to the World wide Web Consortium (W3C), however, the rapid "hypergrowth" of the web from 1992 to mid-1995 has now somewhat slowed to roughly gaining an order of magnitude "only" every 30 months.(3)