Why use WWW?

The Internet is HUGE. October 1994 Estimates are of more than 3.8 Million hosts with access, an estimated 40 Million users with at least Electronic Mail access and a rate of growth of about 80% per annum. The World Wide Web itself is also becoming ubiquitous as an information distribution and access mechanism.

From January to December 1993, the amount of network traffic (in bytes) across the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) North American network attributed to Web use multiplied by 187 times. In December 1993 the Web was ranked 11th of all network services in terms of sheer byte traffic - just twelve months earlier, its rank was 127.

World-Wide Web growth. Statistics available by FTP from nic.merit.edu.

A number of Robot programs have been written to scan the Internet for Web servers and to follow links in order to discover other Web servers (World-Wide Web Wanderer, WebCrawler, RBSE's URL database, New Internet Knowledge System [NIKOS], WWW Worm, Lycos). From these results we can determine that the Web is growing at an enormous rate and it can be safely stated that, as of April 1995, there are at least 25,000 hypertext Web servers in use throughout the world. See also Open Market's Internet Index.

Based on Web site statistics, estimates of the number of knowledgeable Web users in the world has been as large as four million. However, considering the number of hosts that frequent the most populated areas of the Web, it is safe to say that there are around 500,000 to 1,000,000 current active Web users today.

The Web offers a very simple-to-use interface to the traditionally hard-to-master resources on the Internet. The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme. To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data. It is probably this ease of use as well as the popularity of many graphical interfaces to the Web that caused the explosion of Web traffic in 1993.

The potential of using networked hypertext and multimedia has prompted many users to create and explore countless innovative applications on the Internet.

Last modified: Thu May 4 12:13:26 1995