Shopping around the internet today and tomorrow: towards the millennium ofcybermedicine

The evolution of the "information age" in medicine is mirrored in the expon ential growth of medical web pages, increasing numbers of databases accessi ble on line, and expanding services and publications available on the inter net, 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 w orld wide web had at least 320 million web pages of general content.(1) In addition, there are countless conversational areas on the internet, like th at rooms and newsgroups, where people exchange messages on tens of thousand s of subjects, Somewhere more than 150 million people currently communicate over the Internet(2) According to the World wide Web Consortium (W3C), how ever, the rapid "hypergrowth" of the web from 1992 to mid-1995 has now some what slowed to roughly gaining an order of magnitude "only" every 30 months .(3)