Internet Boom
Today the Internet is widely used in homes, schools, and businesses around the world. However, that hasn’t always been the case. The Internet was rst developed in the 1960s and 1970s by U.S. government scientists as a way of sharing information. The earliest version of the Internet was called ARPAnet, for Advanced Research Projects Agency network. In 1969, only four computers were connected to the ARPAnet. Just 20 years later, though, as computers became more commonly developed, over 80,000 computers were connected.
Use of the Internet has continued to grow dramatically. Experts estimate that about 1% of the world’s population used the Internet in 1996. By 2008, that percentage grew to nearly 24%.
How do researchers count more than 1 billion users? Programs called web crawlers browse the Internet to monitor how many pages and users are out there. Web crawlers work automatically, collecting data once they are started. These programs are sometimes called “spiders” because they “crawl” around the Web.
As the Internet continues to grow, an increasing number of spiders scurry invisibly, collecting and sending information 24 hours a day