ABOUT THE INTERNET

The current numbers of users on the Internet is 2.2 billion!

Every month, Google, the world’s leading Search engine handles 100 Billion Searches! That equates to almost 40,000 every second. How much the internet does weighs? The weight of all information on the internet is 0.2 millionths of an Ounce. That is similar to the weight of the smallest possible grain of sand.

The English once took it to be an alphabet. The Chinese affectionately term it ‘the little mouse’. The Dutch call it an ‘elephant’s trunk’, the Germans a spider monkey, the Italians as a snail. It is ‘&’ (ampersand). The inspiration for the brand name Yahoo! Came from a word made up by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver’s Travels. A Yahoo was a person who was ugly and not a human in appearance. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare, is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know the HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact, the submit button was a later addition and initially, hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

The day after Internet Explorer 4 was released, a few Microsoft employees left a 10 by 12-foot Internet Explorer logo on Netscape’s front lawn with a message that said “We love you” at the height of the browser wars in the late 90’s. The world ‘e-mail’ has been banned by the French Ministry of culture. They are required to use the word ‘Courriel’ instead, which is the French equivalent of Internet. This move became the subject of ridicule from the cyber community in general. Did you know that www.symbolics.com was the first ever domain name registered online? According to a University of Minnesota report, researchers estimate the volume of Internet traffic is growing at an annual rate of 50 to 60 per cent. The term Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. In February 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 per cent several times more than Face book.