Things You Didn't Know about the Internet

1. The first and oldest registered domain name on the internet is symbolics.com. It’s still live and exists largely as a historic site.

2. The urban legend (and/or long-running joke) aside, Al Gore didn’t invent the internet. No one person or even small group can claim they did. However, Gore isrecognized as perhaps having done more than any other elected official to support the development of the internet from the 1970s to the '90s.

3. There are more than 275 million registered domain names.

4. The Web currently contains more than 4.7 billion webpages.

5. In 1995, less than 1% of the world’s population could get online. Today, about 40% of us have an internet connection.

6. The country with the largest percentage of its population connected to the internet is Bermuda, with 97.75% going online. That’s followed by Qatar (96.65%), Bahrain (96.53%), Iceland (96.5%) and Norway (96.15%).

7. Here in Canada, 92.89% of us can access the internet.

8. Approximately 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, and people around the world watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos daily.

9. Roughly 16 to 20% of queries that Google gets each day are original and have never been asked before on Google.

10. In 1995, Rogers became the first company to launch high-speed internet service in North America.

11. One of the most famous quotes about the internet – “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” – comes from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon showing a dog sitting on a chair in front of a computer, speaking to another dog sitting on the floor. It’s been reproduced more than any other New Yorker cartoon, earning the illustrator more than $50,000.

12. Canadians visit more websites and spend more time online on our desktop computers (36.3 hours per month) than anyone else in the world.

13. Older adults have historically lagged behind youth in their use of the internet, and there’s a stereotype that elderly people aren’t tech savvy. But today, most senior citizens (58%) in North America know how to use the Web and do so regularly.

14. Google vice-president and internet guru Vint Cerf recently said that in the near future, cars, buildings, cities and people will have sensors and software that track resources, respond to crime or take constant vital signs. “Once we’ve connected everything to everything else,” he adds, “safety and privacy will be big challenges. It’s impossible to stop abuse, but we have to be able to detect it.”

15. By 2017, 7 trillion devices will be connected to the internet. That’s roughly 1,000 devices for each person alive.