World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a network of independent websites bound together by the internet. It is indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
It was developed in the 1990s and was originally welcomed as a more diverse alternative to "walled gardens" like Compuserve, Dow Jones, and AOL.
It hit its heyday in the 2000s. There were large numbers of HTML pages, independent wikis, forums, blogs, and other types of sites.
By the 2010s and 2020s it has become less relevant as content has migrated to large platforms like Facebook, X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, and so forth.
Search engines like Google began presenting results on the main search page rather than encouraging visitors to click through the the original content creator's page. This further reduced the relevancy of independent websites.
Google also changed its algorithm to remove results from independent sites.