Although the World Wide Web is often referred to as the Internet, the two are not the same thing. The Internet is a huge network of networks that links computers together all over the world using a range of wires and wireless technologies. The World Wide Web is the collection of linked pages that are accessed using the Internet and a web browser.
English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee is regarded as having invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Since then he has continued the development of web standards and other web related projects.
Website addresses such as http://www.sciencekids.co.nz are known by the term Uniform Resource Locater (URL).
The domain name system of the Internet includes top level domains such as .com, .info, .net, .org, .edu, .mil and .gov as well as country specific domains and more.
As well as the World Wide Web, the Internet is used for such application as email, file sharing, online chat, phone and video calls, online gaming and more.
Thanks to the increasing accessibility of the Internet, the popularity of the web has exploded over the last 10 years. The web is now used for a number of different purposes including online shopping, social networking, games, news, travel information, business, advertising and much more.
Social networking websites such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter have become popular over the last few years. People now spend a large amount of their time online keeping in touch with each other through these applications and services.
Security and privacy concerns have always been a problem on the Internet with many people often unaware of the potential risks they take when inputting confidential data, passwords and personal information into various websites. Viruses and spam emails are other sources over security concerns which frequently cause disruptions and headaches for users of the web.
One of the best and most common ways of finding information on the web is through the use of search engines such as Google and Bing. Google is currently the most popular search engine, receiving hundreds of millions of search queries every day.