Term time is back in the UK, which means kids are back learning with renewed enthusiasm (we hope). Evening meals around the dinner table will feature many “did you know” remarks as new topics are explored and old ones are uncovered.
With the buzz of a new term here, we thought it would be suitable for us to share some fascinating facts regarding the World Wide Web; looking at the changes between its early days and now. Here are a few ‘did you knows’ which you can share with the kids, making sure you’re ready for after school chat.
The Web: Then
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee effectively invented the World Wide Web in 1989 when he created a document named “Information Management: A Proposal” – this means the web celebrated its 30th birthday in 2019.
- The phrase ‘surfing the web’ was first coined in 1992 by Jean Armour Polly, a librarian and author who has written a series of books on safe Internet services. Surfing was the word used as it alludes to moving easily and smoothly from one place to another.
- The first ever website is still around today! People can still visit the page, although as you can imagine, it’s very dated. Check it out here.
- The first ever image to be uploaded was of CERN house band ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’ in 1992.
- In 1998 Google was launched, but didn’t really certify its dominance as the world’s leading search engine until between 2002-2004.
The Web: Now
- It’s said that approximately 250 billion emails are sent every day and 81% of these emails are spam.
- As of January 2019 there were over 1.94 billion websites on the Internet.
- There are more devices connected to the World Wide Web than there are human beings.
- Google is the most visited website and there are over 5 billion Google searches made every day.
- Over 90,000 websites are hacked every day.
With the web constantly growing, fascinating new facts and statistics are uncovered every week. To keep up with them, why not follow us across our four social media channels?