Do You Know What “URL” Stands For?

National Internet Day is October 29 and looking back at AOL’s quaint “You’ve got mail” ads circa 1997, few could imagine what the internet would mean all these years later.

We loved this new thing called “email,” but could we imagine booking entire overseas vacations on our phones at 3 a.m.? Or something called Instagram? Or the web’s worldwide implications?

Let’s take a moment to look back at how it all happened — and what’s coming next.

• 1969 – Charley Kline, a young grad student on the UCLA campus attempts to send the first internet message to his colleague, Bill Duvall, at Stanford. They succeeded — sort of — in their attempt to send the word “LOGIN.”
• 1996 – AOL introduces a monthly flat rate for access to internet chat rooms instead of charging by the hour. For $19.95 a month, users could now stay for as long as they wanted. AOL’s subscriber base would grow to 17 million by 1999.
• 1989 – British scientist Tim Berners-Lee spent the late 1980s and early 90s creating hypertext markup language (HTML), the first uniform resource locator (URL), and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).
• 1991 – The World Wide Web (WWW) became publicly available
• 2004 – Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook as a Harvard-only social network. By 2011, Facebook’s estimated worth stands at $50 billion. The dawn of “fake news” on Facebook would influence the 2016 presidential election.
• 2019 – Amazon emerges as America’s second-largest private employer. (Only Walmart has more workers.) Jeff Bezos’ company has connections to more than a third of all retail products bought or sold online in the U.S. Amazon also owns Whole Foods and helps arrange the shipment of items purchased across the Web
• Why don’t you start your celebration of National Internet Day by visiting the original website, which just so happens to still be online!
• The internet is 12,410 days old today.
• There are more than 70,000 Google queries per second. That’s more than 4 million searches happening every minute.
• Over 30,000 websites are hacked every day. Now would be a great time to double-check the security of your passwords!
• The “Despascito” music video is the most-watched YouTube video of all time, clocking over 7 billion views. Plus one more reluctant view in the name of researching this blog post.
• Every minute, 300 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube. That’s 5 hours of content per second.
• Discovery Education has put together the ultimate ode to the internet in the form of a seriously cool virtual field trip. “The Internet of Things” provides a fascinating glimpse into the many ways the Internet shapes daily life.
• Take off in Google’s Flight Simulator
• 15% of all searches have never been searched before on Google.
• An average person conducts 3–4 searches every single day.
• Google’s signature email product has a 27% share of the global email client market.
• 3,849,865 mobile apps were available in the Google Play Store in Q1, 2018.
• 49% of all mobile gamers are women.
• If you search for “askew” in Google, the content will tilt slightly to the right.
• The “I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google $110 million per year, as it bypasses all ads.
• YouTube is the second-largest search engine, right after Google. It’s bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask combined.

Sources:

National Today

Days of the Year

ID Tech

SEO Tribunal