KnowSoda
TechnologyInternet & Cybersecurity
The Web & the Cloud: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
The World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, near Geneva: pages joined by hyperlinks, running on top of the internet.
Key fact
The first website went live in 1991, and you can still visit it.
Browsers & URLs
A browser fetches web pages and shows them. A URL is a page’s address: the protocol, the domain name and the path.
Key fact
“www” stands for World Wide Web.
Cloud Computing
The cloud means using computers in huge data centres over the internet, for storage, apps or processing, instead of only your own device.
Key fact
“The cloud” is really just someone else’s computers.
Search Engines
Search engines send programs called crawlers to visit pages, build a giant index, and rank the results by how useful they seem.
Key fact
Google began as a Stanford research project, becoming a company in 1998.
Data Centres
Data centres are warehouses full of servers that store and process the cloud’s data. They use a lot of electricity, much of it for cooling.
Key fact
Data centres use roughly 1 to 2% of the world’s electricity.
Cookies
Cookies are small files that websites store in your browser. They keep you logged in and remember your basket, but they can also track you across sites.
Key fact
Third-party cookies are the ones mostly used for tracking.
The Web Today
There are over a billion websites, though most are inactive. More than 5 billion people use the internet, most of them mainly on phones.
Key fact
Over half of web traffic comes from mobile phones.
Fun facts
In 1993, CERN released the web’s software into the public domain, so anyone could use it for free.
Tim Berners-Lee has said the “//” in web addresses was never really needed.
Many data centres are built in cold places, like Finland and Iceland, to save on cooling.
Before it was called Google, the search engine was named BackRub, because it studied links pointing back to pages.
Microsoft once tested a data centre sealed in a tank on the seabed off Scotland.
Web cookies were invented in 1994 by Lou Montulli at Netscape, to remember online shopping baskets.
By some estimates, nearly half of all web traffic comes from bots, not people.
Story: Vague but Exciting
Vague but Exciting
March 1989, CERN. Tim Berners-Lee hands his boss a proposal for linking documents across computers. His boss scribbles on it: “Vague but exciting…”
That was enough. On a NeXT computer, Berners-Lee builds the first web browser and web server. By Christmas 1990, the web is running.
The server wore a handwritten label: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” Switching it off would have switched off the web.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
-
Question 1 of 10
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
Show the answer
True. At CERN, the European physics lab.
-
Question 2 of 10
A URL is the address of a web page.
Show the answer
True. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.
-
Question 3 of 10
Cloud computing provides storage or processing over a network.
Show the answer
True. On demand, from data centres.
-
Question 4 of 10
Search engines build an index of web pages.
Show the answer
True. Like the index at the back of a book, but vast.
-
Question 5 of 10
Data centres need a lot of cooling.
Show the answer
True. Servers get hot running all day.
-
Question 6 of 10
Cookies can keep you logged in to a site.
Show the answer
True. They remember who you are between visits.
-
Question 7 of 10
Over half of web traffic comes from phones.
Show the answer
True. Mobile overtook desktop in the 2010s.
-
Question 8 of 10
The web was invented before the internet.
Show the answer
False. The web runs on the internet, which came first.
-
Question 9 of 10
A browser is the same thing as the internet.
Show the answer
False. A browser is an app for viewing the web.
-
Question 10 of 10
Using the cloud means everything runs on your own device.
Show the answer
False. The work happens on remote servers.
Keep going in the app
KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. The Web & the Cloud has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- CERN — The birth of the Web
- MDN Web Docs — How the web works, cookies, URLs
- IEA — Data centres and data transmission networks
- ITU — Facts and Figures 2024
- Microsoft — Project Natick
- Pew Research Center (2024), when online content disappears
- W3C — About the World Wide Web Consortium
- Google Transparency Report — HTTPS encryption on the web
- World Health Organization — Disability fact sheet
