Most of the people use the words Internet and WWW interchangeably. In fact, they don’t see any difference between the two. Only some of the curious folks ask about the difference between Internet and WWW. They wonder if both these things are same? If not, then what are the differences between the two? The quick answer is that technically Internet and WWW are not the same things. And today we will understand the major differences between these two terms.
The Internet
Internet is a massive network of networks. It is essentially an interconnection between millions of smaller computer networks scattered around the globe. These networks are connected with each other by the means of overground cables, underground cables, satellite links and sub-oceanic cables etc.
The word “Internet” actually refers to all the hardware infrastructure present in the network. Such hardware includes computer systems, routers, cables, bridges, servers, cellular towers, satellites and other pieces.
All these pieces of hardware operate under the Internet Protocol (IP). Different computing devices in the Internet are identified by their IP addresses.
World Wide Web (WWW)
In the course of life, when people say “Internet”, most of the time they actually refer to the World Wide Web or the WWW. The www is the collection of all the information that is available in the Internet. So, all the text, images, audio, videos online — all this forms the www. Most of this information is accessed through websites and we identify websites by their domain names. There is huge amount of information available in the www. Only a tiny part of this information is searchable through popular search engines like Google. However, most of the information lies in the Deep Web and Dark Web.
WWW uses http protocol to access the information from various servers. Information is sent as web pages which are organized in the form of websites. Various web pages are interlinked with each other through hyperlinks. Web pages and other pieces of information in WWW are identified by their Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address.
If you want to have an idea about how much information is available in the WWW, you can read our articles on the massiveness of the Internet, YouTube and Facebook.
Here is Vsauce. He is explaining the difference between the Internet and the www in the following video:
Table of Differences Between Internet and WWW
The following table lists the major differences between the two terms.
| Internet | WWW | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Internet originated sometimes in late 1960s. | English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 |
| 2. | Nature of Internet is hardware. | Nature of www is software. |
| 3. | Internet consists of computers, routers, cables, bridges, servers, cellular towers, satellites etc. | www consists of information like text, images, audio, video |
| 4. | The first version of the Internet was known as ARPANET | In the beginning WWW was known as NSFNET |
| 5. | Internet works on the basis of Internet Protocol (IP) | WWW works on the basis of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) |
| 6. | Internet is independent of WWW | WWW requires the Internet to exist |
| 7. | Internet is superset of WWW | WWW is a subset of the Internet. Apart from supporting www, the Internet’s hardware infrastructure is used for other things as well (e.g. FTP, SMTP) |
| 8. | Computing devices are identified by IP Addresses | Information pieces are identified by Uniform Resource Locator (URL) |
These were some of the major differences between Internet and WWW. We hope this article was useful for you. Please feel free to comment if you have any question or suggestions for this article. We will try our best to assist you. Thank you for using TechWelkin!
thnks sir for sharing such a beautiful information
Hey Lalit,
Almost every graduation degree consists such things but people have adopted those simple meanings.
For one in every three persons, the Internet is same as of WWW.
World Wide Web is a far way than the Internet. You brought a simple yet necessary point.
~Ravi