Over 189,000 Search Queries Are Processed By Google – Every Second

World Wide Web Day is a global celebration dedicated to web browsing, the online activity that bring the whole world to your fingertips, and places a wealth of knowledge at your feet.

Have you ever found yourself saying “where would I be without the Internet?” – This is something that a lot of people remark all of the time!

• 1971 – The first network email was indeed sent by engineer Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971 during a test using the ARPANET system
• 1979 – The first emoticon is credited to Kevin Mackenzie in 1979 who typed in the simple “-)”. Three years later, Scott Fahlman proposed a “:-)” which has become the norm.
• 1990 – Archie was the first-ever search engine. It went live in 1990. From there, other search engines such as Google, and Yahoo were developed.
• 1991 – The WorldWideWeb browser is made available on the public internet.
• 1992 – The first-ever image that was posted on the World Wide Web, was uploaded in 1992 by Berners-Lee. It was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, which is a parody pop band that was founded by employees at CERN.
• 1992 – A librarian named Jean Armour Polly is credited with coining the term “Surfing the Web.”  This was as a consequence of an article she published called “Surfing the Internet” in March of 1992.
• 1993 – It was announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone in 1993.
• 1993 – The launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993 was a major turning point for the World Wide Web. It is credited with popularizing the World Wide Web.
• 1993 – At the start of 1993, there were only 50 servers around the world. By October of that year, there were over 500 servers and growing.
• 1994 – InternetWorks is launched, which allows people to open tabs in the browser window.
• 1994 – The first ever order placed on the internet was to Pizza Hut in 1994
• 1994 – Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, Amazon started as an online bookstore and grew into the world’s largest online retailer and cloud services provider. Its vast e-commerce platform and AWS infrastructure are foundational to the modern web.
• 1995 – Yahoo! Directory was launched in January of 1994, and this was then followed by the search engine – Yahoo! Search – in 1995.
• 1995 – We also saw the start of web commerce in 1995, as Amazon and eBay were both founded. Amazon originally went online as a bookstore in 1995.
• 1996 – Internet Explorer is integrated into the Windows computer system.
• 1996 – The “Dancing Baby,” created in 1996, became one of the earliest viral sensations.
• 1996 – Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to digitized collections of materials, including websites, music, moving images, and millions of books. It preserves the history of the Web through its Wayback Machine.
• 1998 – Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google LLC is an American multinational technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Its search engine is synonymous with navigating the World Wide Web.
• 2003 – Established in 2003, the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation, and participation on the Internet. It is best known for developing the Firefox web browser, a key player in promoting open web standards.
• 2026 – As of early 2026, it’s estimated that over 5.5 billion people globally use the internet, with the vast majority accessing the World Wide Web daily for information, communication, and entertainment.
• The first computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a web server was a NeXT computer.  This computer was also used to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb.
• While the first popular search engine is known as Yahoo! Search, it is believed that Archie was the first of its kind. This was the first tool for FTP archive indexing, enabling people to locate specific files.
• The top five most popular websites list includes Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, and Wikipedia.
• The World Wide Web and the Internet are not the same things.
  • The Internet is a network that computers connect to in order to access the World Wide Web. On the other hand, the WWW is software-oriented.
  • The history of the Internet goes back a lot further than the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is a worldwide information medium that people can access using their computers when they are connected to the Internet.
  • The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, as a way for him to communicate with co-workers via hyperlinks.
• The WWW was not initially meant for the public and was devised to be utilized by physicists to share data.
• There are over 1.8 billion live websites around the world.
• The top five most popular websites list includes Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, and Wikipedia.
• There are approximately 16.4 billion searches on Google every day
• Google processes 189,815 searches per second
• More than 6 billion (74% of the global population) people in the world surf the web daily.
• According to the most recent statistics, China leads as the country with the most active web surfers. It is then followed by India and then America.
• The number of devices connected to the web exceeds that of the human population.
• The web took four years to reach its first 50 million users, while it took broadcast radio 38 years and television 13 years.

Sources:

Days of the Year

National Today

BBC

Technotification

Over Sixty