A company called BenLo Park Research tracked 2.1 million visits to 1,727 Web sites over a two-month period between June and August 1995 and found that Netscape was the browser of choice for 83.5 percent of the users. Just 2.9 percent of the contacts came from Mosaic browsers, 2.8 percent from America Online, 1.8 percent from NetCruiser, and 1.1 percent from Prodigy. The wildly popular Yahoo WWW database maintains a script that randomly samples the contacts it receives from an estimated 1.4 million different users per week. One other browser merits some mention here. Lynx was developed by the University of Kansas in 1993 to provide WWW access on systems that do not support graphics.
Lynx provides interactivity but only accesses the text files of Web servers.
However, it is the best means of Web access for nearly five percent of Yahoo database users. The host computer is the machine on the Internet upon which the desired information resides. The third component is the location of the desired file or directory within the file structure of the host computer. The NetSearch button on Netscape is the best place to start, providing access to InfoSeek, Lycos, and WebCrawler, in addition to several others. Each employs different search strategies that are explained in easily-accessible information files.