What Hath Yahoo Wrought?

It's a jungle out there on the World Wide Web--a wild, exploding tangle of home pages, hotlinks, and way cool sites. And it's a wonder that cyberspace explorers don't all get lost. As of Jan. 1, the Web included some 200,000 sites, or Web servers, that offered close to 20 million pages of information for public consumption. Dozens of times a second, all across the globe, the Web sprouts yet another new page of text, graphics, sound, or video, and the online trove expands by who knows how many more megabytes.

No wonder some of the most successful companies on the Internet are those that are helping masses of people find their way in this teeming overgrowth of information. Their so-called Web-search engines, which maintain free, public directories of the Net's sprawling contents, are among the biggest attractions on the Web and as a result, the most densely packed with paid advertising from companies such as Honda, Saturn, and AT&T.