I recently discovered a webcomic entitled Internet Explorer, which follows Internet Explorer in her quest to defeat Google Chrome. Tech companies, browsers, and search engines are all represented as different characters in the comic. We have Internet Explorer (who later morphs into Edge), Bing, Chrome, DuckDuckGo, and some others (including Netscape). It's all very good, but what annoyed me was when I read the comments section. The number of people who were uneducated on the workings of the Internet was somewhat surprising to me. One character in the webcomic is World Wide Web, who wears a WWW necklace. In the comments, people were asking what WWW stands for, which I realize is not entirely common knowledge. And people were satisfying their curiosity by answering that WWW does in fact stand for World Wide Web. But then I discovered that people in the replies were also saying to those genuinely curious folks that the World Wide Web was the "Ancient Internet"! That bothered me a little bit.

Of course there was no "Ancient Internet". I don't know if these people know this, but the Internet involves computers, which are an innovation of the 20th century. Therefore, no ancient internet. But that's probably not exactly what they meant. Additionally, World Wide Web is a term separate in definition than Internet. The Internet is the connections between computers which enables the existence of the World Wide Web, a collection of websites that are universally accessible. The Internet existed for some years before the World Wide Web was invented, and communication was largely via email at this point. The Internet as we know it came about throughout the 1980s and was available commercially in 1989. Also in 1989, email services connected to the Internet, allowing communication with anyone else with a connection. It was in 1993 that the World Wide Web was publicly released for free, making it possible for anyone to use it and it was not long before there were thousands of websites.

So please if ever you see someone talking about the World Wide Web and calling it the Ancient Internet, please kindly correct them and make sure they know the whole story. We can always use a little more education.

Question in the comments section: What is DuckDuckGo anyway? Answer: It's a browser that doesn't spy on you.

DuckDuckGo is actually a search engine, a website with an index of lots of documents on the World Wide Web that can easily be searched to find information. Also Google Chrome and Internet Explorer are certainly not search engines, like people seem to believe. They're browsers, programs able to read and display HTML files from the World Wide Web. In high school, I often found that students would use Google as a research source when writing an essay or project of some sort. Google itself is not a source, it's a way to find sources. The answer to your question that might pop up at the top of Google search results or to the right hand side isn't from Google, it's probably from Wikipedia* or some other website. That is the website you are looking for as your Source, not just "Google". If you download an image from Google Images, you also do not cite Google. Instead cite the name of the website where the image came from, found beneath the image when you click on it.