In fact, they used the word element to talk about anything that was basic. Ancient Greek philosophers, for example, thought that everything consisted of four elements: earth, fire, water, and air. Other philosophers thought there were only two elements: sulfur and mercury.
The Internet was expected to eliminate search costs (Pereira 2005). For example, electronic commerce was predicted to cause disintermediation as search costs become low enough for end-consumers to incur them directly instead of employing retailers to do this for them.
1999: one billion per year (based on three million searches per day in August 1999, as reported by John Battelle in his great book, The Search. The figures, Iâm fairly certain, came directly from Google, which was more open back then when needing to prove its growth story)