January marked the launch 10 years ago of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed as an “experimental” database under the Entrez retrieval system, with full access to MEDLINE. “Experimental” was quickly dropped, however, and, at a June 26,1997 Capitol Hill press conference with Vice President Al Gore, the information highway became a freeway. PubMed opened up free access to MEDLINE, forever altering the way the world would search for biomedical information.

There would be approximately two million PubMed searches that June. Today, the current daily average exceeds three million!