Happy Birthday – 30 Years of World Wide Web [Infographic]

You would have a much better understanding of the World Wide Web if you knew a bit about the differences between the internet and the World Wide Web. Confusing enough that our way of using words especially when we talk sometimes does not reflect what we mean. 

Most people have a common misunderstanding that the Internet and WWW (World Wide Web) are the same as the two terms are often used for each other. But let’s sit back and see what is the difference between both of them. While the Internet is a global network comprised of computers, the World Wide Web is an extremely common application used online and it uses the hypertext transfer protocol, or http, to navigate across different websites. So in simple terms, we can say that one is the infrastructure while the other one is the application layer on top of it.

Furthermore, there are even different areas of the Web, we usually say the common and surface web, deep web and dark web.  While the surface web is the most commonly used one for Google, Bing, Wikipedia or any other publicly visible website, the deep web holds more data for Government, Medical Records, or other database is driven resources. Most of the data in the deep web are protected and not accessible to everyone.

The Dark Web is an area which we usually don’t access, traffic happening here is from criminal nature, illegal information and high secured privacy communication. People accessing the dark web need to use special browsers like Tor and even closed shell systems with VPN.

But let’s go back to our party today, Happy Birthday.

30 Years of the World Wide Web

It all started with a gentleman from England, Tim Berners-Lee also known as TimBL, who in March 1989 wrote a proposal which outlined the concept of the world wide web, as we know it today. Nearly a year later in October 1990, a student wrote the first-ever search engine called Archie. Already 2.6 million internet users used the world wide web at this time, while TimBL published the first browser in 1990 and invented HTTP and HTML.

The first ever website went online in August 1991. In the following years, companies went online which reads like the who-is-who of the NASDAQ stock exchange. In January 1994 Yahoo registered its Domain name, in the same year a garage located in Seattle was the home of Jeff Bezos Amazon, and later the year banner marketing was launched.

The success continued and 1994 three years after the launch, over 44 million internet users had been active on the world wide web. Netscape launched one year before with their browser than Microsoft who launched in 1995. In the same year, eBay opened its doors, and 1997 the first pup up for advertising was created.

In September 1998 finally, Google appeared on the scene. Actually, a research project from 1996 led to the establishment of a privately held company focusing on search, Google Search.

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The era of the year 2000 and beyond brought more innovation but also more regulation. A recession in Japan triggered the “do-com bubble” to burst and only 49% of dot-com businesses launched since 1996 were still operating after 2004. Google started AdWords in 2000 with the goal to have shared advertisement and competing on the market with “GoTo.com”.

Take a full journey over the timeline which was put together by AppInstitute in the Infographic below. The journey continues until the year 2019. Mozilla, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix are only some names which contribute to the success of the world wide web. The driver of success was and is innovation, users experience, and information overload. Enjoy the journey and read the infographic below.