Chapter List

1.1 A brief history of Knowledge Management and portals

More information is transferred in a single day on the Internet in the twenty-first century than was even known to exist at the beginning of the twentieth century on this planet. Isn't that an amazing fact? Would you like to know the source? We made it up 89.23% of all statistics have been made up but it sounds really impressive and might even be close to correct. We may be off by a hundred years or so, but a hundred years is just a blink of an eye in the history of the greater universe, according to Dr. Carl Sagan.

Okay, so we don't have an accurate statistic about the amount of information available today, but anyone living in the twenty-first century is well aware that we are swimming, and sometimes surfing, in a sea of information. We are all looking to obtain useful knowledge that can help us in our lives. Virtually anyone attempting to navigate the Internet for knowledge has used search engines. The Internet and, especially, the World Wide Web (the Web) are so vast that finding information virtually requires using search engines with clever names. Most people see the Web as the height of humankind's progress in terms of knowledge and information.

We all have experienced search engines as we have used the Web. Search engines...