The dissemination of the Internet has transformed how many Americans find information and altered how they engage with many institutions, such as government, health care providers, the news media, and commercial enterprises.\u00a0 Terms such as electronic commerce, e-health, telemedicine, and e-government were novel ten years ago.\u00a0 Today, major newspapers and magazines routinely have special sections on these topics, with many having feature sections on these subjects regularly.\u00a0 A growing body of government researchers, market research organizations, and scholars has begun to focus on these areas. With the steady growth of Internet penetration, and the sometimes-fevered focus on the Internet\u2019s transformative potential, Americans have begun to expect a lot from the Internet.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n
Although it is difficult to pinpoint when the Internet began to create expectations among all Americans about the availability of online information, two snapshots taken from the past couple of years are informative.\u00a0 Pew Internet Project researchers found during a study of community technology initiatives in Cleveland in late 2000 that some low-income people who came to the community center to pick up Internet skills were driven in part by aggressive marketing campaigns by major Internet service providers.\u00a0 But these nascent users had a very thin knowledge base. They wanted to know about the CD-ROMs they were receiving in the mail and what the Internet was all about.\u00a0 Fast forward two years later to another community technology center in Virginia, and Pew Internet researchers found that very new Internet users quickly embraced the Internet for sophisticated applications such as filling medicine prescriptions online.\u00a0 For whatever reason\u2014whether it is a larger Internet population or the numerous stories about the Internet on TV and in the newspapers\u2014new Internet users seem to go online expecting to find information that matters to them.<\/p>\n\n
Another\u2014and probably more important\u2014reason for rising expectations about the Internet-as-information-utility has to do with the growing ranks of veteran Internet users.\u00a0 At the end of 1999\u2014about the time the first articles began to appear worrying about \u201cInternet hype\u201d\u2014only about one-third of Internet users had been online for three years or more.\u00a0 In September 2002, for the first time, two-thirds (68%) of Internet users said they have been online for three or more years; nearly two in five (38%) say they have been online six years or more.\u00a0 With growing online experience comes greater skill at finding things online.\u00a0 And notwithstanding the dot-com shakeout, the passage of time has meant more useful content becoming available on the Web.\u00a0 The upshot is more information online and more experienced users searching for it with greater ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.\u00a0 The result is high expectations about what is online.<\/p>\n\n
A final piece of the picture is the growth of Web sites that help deliver on expectations and that have become, for many Internet users, trusted online sources and tools.\u00a0 \u201cGoogle\u201d was a word that would have elicited, at best, a raised eyebrow among Americans a few years ago.\u00a0 Today, the popular search engine is, according to comScore Media Metrix, the fourth rated Internet property (in terms of unique visitors). \u201cGoogle\u201d is a verb commonly used among the Internet cognoscenti in referring to online searches.\u00a0 Upstart sites such as eBay, Amazon, iVillage, Classmates.com, and Travelocity serve the needs of numerous Internet users and are among comScore\u2019s top 20 sites.\u00a0 More established companies, such as AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Walt Disney, and the New York Times have popular Web sites that serve a range of users\u2019 informational and transactional needs.<\/p>\n\n
The testimony of Internet users speaks loudly about the expectations that people bring to their online information searchers.\u00a0 We asked Internet users who come to the Pew Internet Project Web site the following question: \u201cDoes the Internet deliver on your expectations? For example, when you need information, do you expect to find answers online? If you are not able to find the information, do you give up the search or go to an off-line source?\u201d Although the respondents were far from a random sample, most respondents were enthusiastic in saying that the Internet delivered on their informational expectations.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n
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