Is The Web Bigger Than The Internet
To start with, let’s try to understand what do exactly the terms web and Internet mean? To answer this I studied an excerpt from the answers provided by the founders of the World Wide Web. The answer was pretty interesting as it described the differences between web and internet. According to Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of WorldWideWeb, the internet is a network of networks. Internet is made up of several networks. Internet is an interconnection of hundreds of smaller networks. These networks are then made by some more networks which are even smaller than their parents. Each of these networks is made up of computers and connecting wires (or the transmission wires). The smallest unit of the internet is a computer which is connected to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) through a transmission line. The ISP is also connected with several other computers of the same area. The local ISP is then connected with national network of ISPs. These ISPs then connect the country’s computers to the world through greater transmission lines (often undersea fiber optics). Each country’s computers are interconnected with the rest of the world through a similar network and hence together these networks form the internet.
Web on the other hand is a virtual space, an abstract place containing information. The internet is composed of computers, the web is composed of documents, audios, videos, and information. The internet is connected with transmission lines while the web is connected with hypertext links. The Web exists because of communication between the computers on the internet and hence the Web cannot exist without the internet.
Since you have understood the difference (, hopefully) between the web and the internet, you might be interested to know whether the web is bigger than internet. The web consists of the websites and to find the answer we need to look at the contribution of each website in the size of the web. Big websites are using an overwhelming number of computers to serve their visitors. Google alone is using 300,000 computers to serve the queries of their users (this information was collected in 2006). But Google is just taking 5% of the Internet’s total traffic. Imagine the number of computers involved in rest of the 95%. So, one may say that the web is bigger than the internet!
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