The World Wide Web Consortium (WW3) is founded.

Martijn Koster develops ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It will be demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994. "Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

At Xerox PARC Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser describe proposed electronic features of the "national information infrastructure" in a paper entitled Libraries are More than Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries. All references cited in this paper are to printed publications.

The British Library Oriental and India Office Collections acquires "a collection of twenty-nine fragments of manuscripts written on birch bark scrolls in the Gāndhārī (a dialect of Prakrit) language and in the Kharohī script. They were contained inside a clay pot, also bearing an inscription in the same language, in which they had been buried in antiquity. Preliminary analysis of these documents indicated that they dated from about the first century A.D., which would make them the oldest surviving substantial collection of Buddhist manuscripts, as well as of any kind of Indian manuscripts."

John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for The Grateful Dead, publishes in Wired an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.) This or a very similar text was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, begin collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. "Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals.)" Citation analysis was pioneered by Eugene Garfield in 1955.

The CAUSE/CNI European Regional Conference, Networked Information in an International Context, is organized by UKOLN in association with CNI, CAUSE, JISC and BL.

At a Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopts the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

IBM also announces software that gives people a hands-free way to dictate text and navigate the desktop with the power of natural speech.

In response to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow writes A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.