A biological theory, called the Cambrian Explosion, states that many new animals quickly appeared (while others underwent genetic diversification) about 530 million years ago. In the millions of years after, the rate of evolution grew even faster, resulting in today's unique and varied species. While I'm aware everyone enjoys the details of evolutionary biology, let's fast-forward a bit. Internet search tools might be headed toward a similar occurrence, and we don't have millions of years to get there. About 10 years ago, the consumer internet emerged. Although the pure internet had existed in some form since the 1960s, the real adoption of what we see as the "consumer web" actually exploded around the mid-1990s. The number of domain hosts skyrocketed from 1 million or so in 1992 to 100 million in 2000. In the next 6 years, that number quadrupled. Now, we're approaching 600 million.
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