This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts.
The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in using their computing devices as a result of the learning opportunities offered. This series of articles shares that hope.
The internet and the World Wide Web are surprisingly two different things. Together they form a worldwide broadcast medium for the general public. Using your traditional computer, smart phone, tablet, Xbox, media player, smart TV or Android TV box, GPS, or car, you can access a world of messaging and content through the internet and the web. Newer uses are smart appliances (like refrigerators), light bulbs and doorbells.
I hope this article will help you to understand these terms.
Some History:
Long before the technology existed to actually build the internet, many scientists had already anticipated the existence of worldwide networks of information. Nikola Tesla, the electrical genius (but business failure), toyed with the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s, and early thinkers like Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush conceived of mechanised, searchable storage systems of books and media in the 1930s and 1940s.
The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the US Department of Defense because of the Cold War, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.
The technology continued to grow in the 1970s after scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a communications model that set standards for how data could be transmitted between multiple networks.
ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there, researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet. The online world then took on a more recognizable form in 1990, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. While it’s often confused with the internet itself, the web is actually just the most common means of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks. This is a hyperlink.
So lots of people (and many others not listed above) have contributed to developing the internet and world wide web.
The internet is a massive hardware network. The internet’s most extensive collection of readable content is called the World Wide Web, a collection of several billion pages and images that are joined by hyperlinks. The BFD is part of the World Wide Web. Many of the computers joined to the internet, though, are not viewable as part of the world wide web. Other content on the internet includes email, instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, and downloading, government and business databases, electrical control systems and much more.
You may hear the expressions Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and the invisible or dark web to describe these billions of web pages.
The expressions web and internet are used interchangeably by most people. This is technically incorrect, as the internet contains the web. In practice, however, most people don’t bother with the distinction.
Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Invisible Web, and Dark Web
When the World Wide Web was launched in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, it was filled with plain text and rudimentary graphics. Effectively a collection of electronic brochures, the web was organised in a simple broadcast/receive format. This simple static format is called Web 1.0. Millions of web pages are still static, and the term Web 1.0 still applies to them.
Here is a copy of that first web page.
In the late 1990s, the web started to move beyond static content and began offering interactive services. Instead of only seeing web pages as brochures, the web began to offer online software that allowed people to perform tasks and receive consumer-type services. Online banking, video gaming, dating services, stock tracking, financial planning, graphics editing, home videos, and web mail became regular online web offerings before the year 2000. These online services are now referred to as Web 2.0. Websites such as Facebook, Flickr, eBay, Digg, and Gmail helped make Web 2.0 a part of our daily lives.
Here is an example of a more modern site. (Warning. This site can take ages to load, because of the multiple images that make up the page).
The invisible web, also called the deep web, is the third part of the World Wide Web. Technically a subset of Web 2.0, the invisible web describes billions of web pages that are purposely hidden from regular search engines. These web pages are protected by passwords or hidden behind firewalls. They are private, confidential pages, such as personal email, personal banking statements, and web pages generated by specialised databases such as job postings in Auckland or Wellington. Invisible web pages are either hidden entirely from casual eyes or require specialised search engines to locate.
In the 2000s, a cloaked part of the World Wide Web spawned the darknet, also called the dark web. Darknet is a private collection of websites that are encrypted to conceal participants’ identities and prevent authorities from tracking users’ activities. The dark web is a black market for traders of illicit goods and a sanctuary for people who seek to communicate away from oppressive governments and dishonest corporations. The dark web can only be accessed through complex technology. You won’t accidentally stumble across the dark web. Most internet users never go there.
I’ve been to a small part of this area of the web, and I advise viewers NOT to go there.
Accessing The Information:
You use a search engine for this. Google is the King of the Hill here, then there is a tail of lesser players. To get an idea of the number and type of players, here are lists of search engines.
- Pandia List
- Virtual Search Engines List
- Search Engine Guide List
- And a New Zealand search engine.
- Other NZ search links (some links here are dead).
Sometimes it takes considerable digging to locate the engine that has the information you need.
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