Internet You & Me
What is internet
Wikipedia.org defines internet as :-
“ The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies ”
Dictionery.com disaper Internet as :-
“ A vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide (usually preceded by the). The Internet includes commercial, educational, governmental, and other networks, all of which use the same set of communications protocols. ”
Some described Internet as :-
“Internet is such a huge network of several different interlinked networks relating to the business, government, academic, and even smaller domestic networks, therefore internet is known as the network of all the other networks. “
All the 3 are by and large talking the saying the same thing using different expression. To simply put it, Internet is a huge network of computers located worldwide capable of connecting with each other. Most of us consider World Wide Web (WWW) and Internet to be same or synonymous, they are not. World Wide Web is a document accessing system which can be accessed via Internet. Meaning, we need Internet to access World Wide Web.
It is amazing how much Internet and WWW has become part of our lives. Like power, Internet has come to be integral part of our living. For some life without Internet is hard to imagine. Here are some numbers which may surprise many.
As of March 31, 2011 there are over :-
- 2 billion Internet users in the world
- China heads the list of most Internet user
- Followed by the United States
- India holds the 3rd position
However, in terms of penetration :-
94% of Norway’s population uses Internet
Closely followed by 92% of Sweden
Interestingly, Asia boasts of maximum users i.e. 44%. The 2nd position is held by Europe having 22.7% users and North America coming 3rd with 13% total users. (source: internetworldstats.com)
What is the size of World Wide Web or how many web pages exist in WWW
The dynamic nature of WWW makes it impossible to answer the above question. The constant influx and deletion of web pages makes it almost impossible to come out with a straight forward number. Though search engines bouts are constantly crawling the World Wide Web but they don’t crawl the entire WWW in one go. Based on the indexes of 3 major Search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo & Bing as of September 2011 counted around 14 billion web pages. (source: worldwidewebsize.com)
Alright, how about number of domains? Yes the headcount of registered domain are available but not all registered domains are active.
VeriSign reports total number of domains registered exceed little over 200 million.
5 Most Popular domain name extension (TLD) are :-
Com
DE (Germany)
Net
UK (United Kingdom)
Org
Source : www.verisign.com