How old is the Internet? In about 1993 the Internet became open to general public use with HTML websites and email with about 1 million computer connections. In 1984, the Internet was formally named and changed to using TCP/IP for its messaging. It was largely on a private network with about 1000 computer connections. The original pre-Internet (ARPANET) started in 1969 with just 4 computers being connected.

How big is the Internet? This is a hard number to measure since anyone can connect their computer or add their website anywhere in the World. Netcraft crawls the Internet looking for websites and they reported 172 million websites that they discovered in June 2008. This is up 44% in the last 12 months. There is 2.8 billion IP addresses reported worldwide which is a measure of the number of connected computers. (DomainTools June 2008)

How many people use the Internet? In the United States 218,302,574 people use the Internet, which is 72% of the total population. This is up from 70% of the total population 12 months earlier. This is according to Internet World Stats as of November 2007. Worldwide there are 1.4 billion people who use the Internet which is about 21% of the world population.

How many searches are done? There were 15.4 billion total searches done in the United States in May, 2008 according to Comscore. This is up 110% in the last 12 months. Google accounts for 57% of all searches, which is 3.7X its nearest rival Yahoo.