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.
Yahoo and Microsoft have thrown billions at their search engines, and now theyâve even joined up. There are millions of different search engines on the Internet, some of which used to be quite successful (Lycos for example) â so this canât be it.