This inscrutability combined with the web’s vastness and anonymity presented a tree-falling-in-the-woods sort of problem. Anyone could now publish anything; but if you did, how would anyone ever know about it? And so, necessity dictated that search engines would become the most popular and most important early websites. And because the problem of a business model had been solved by HotWired, search sites, and Yahoo in particular, would become the web’s first great companies.
