Tech Q&A - The Internet

[Tiberius]

What's the difference between the world wide web and the internet?

The Internet is the "network of networks" which connects computers to each other all over the world. All sorts of services use the Internet to transmit data: email, instant messaging, etc. The "World Wide Web" is just one of these services, generally running on ports 80 and 443 of computer servers, which people access using web browsers.

Not all computers that are on the Internet are part of the World Wide Web; some are just email servers or personal computers for example. The web itself is actually quite abstract; it really only exists as an "entity" inside your web browser. Rather than being a network of servers connected to each other, it is a network of servers pointing to each other via hyperlinks in web pages.