The organization of knowledge is an old problem. Trees and indices are very handy ways to locate books, er, files. There were three things that killed gopher: m

The organization of knowledge is an old problem. Trees and indices are very handy ways to locate books, er, files. There were three things that killed gopher: multimedia, licensing, and search. Inline images really set a webpage apart from the typical wall of text common at the time. University of Minnesota's licensing scheme made the web more attractive. But the killer app was the web search engine: first DEC's AltaVista and then Google. Before web search engines, finding info you wanted on from a website was terrible - unless the pages were modelled after the traditional trees and indices. Links were fun (remember webrings?) but not nearly as useful for finding information until Google figured out ranking pages by weighting links.