Late 1990s to 2000s: The rise of the internet provides a vast amount of data. Machine learning, especially through data-mining techniques, gains importance in businesses and technology sectors. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau pioneered the World Wide Web and created fundamental technologies like HTML, URLs, and HTTP during their tenure at CERN. This groundbreaking achievement marked the dawn of the internet age, enabling widespread and convenient access to information (Phillips, 2021). By 1996 digital data storage had become more cost-effective than storing information on paper (Morris & Truskowski, 2003). The domain google.com was registered a year later, in 1997, and subsequently launched in 1998. This marked the commencement of the search engine’s ascent towards data dominance, as well as the initiation of various other technological advancements, particularly in fields like machine learning, big data, and analytics (Firican). More on machine learning below.
