Some Interesting Facts about Internet

Here are some Interesting facts about the Internet.

Internet is Key Information Source described by Users: In a recent UCL Survey, two thirds of respondents user of Internet described the internet as “Important” or “extremely important” source of information. Just 52% ranked TV and 47% considered radio at the same level. The study also found that Users called the Internet highly credible.

The Average Entertainment Internet User Spends $323.00:The average entertainment user (someone who frequents entertainment related sites) spend $323.00 a year online. Source: Cyber Dialogue.

80 Percent of all websites are in English:According to Jupiter Communications, a leading provider of research on Internet trends, 80 percent of all websites on the Internet today are in English. The research firm estimates that 55 percent of all websites will be published in languages other than English by 2003.

1 in every 28 page views on the Web is a search results page (3.5% of all page views) - June 1, 1999, Alexa Insider

Internet users ranked search as their most important activity, awarding it a 9.1 on a 10-point scale. The next most important activity ranked only 6.3.

The average work user spends 73 minutes per month at search engines, second only to 97 minutes at news, info and entertainment sites (Home users - NIE: 71 mins, adult sites: 65 mins, search engines: 54 mins) - February 1999, Media Metrix

People visit sites linked to a keyboard button 10 times more often than those they’ve bookmarked.

Almost 50% of online users turn to search sites for their online news needs.

Top Online Activities * 92% browse the Web *88% send/receive email *87% collect information about hobby or personal interest *81% collect product or service information *74% read the news *65% get business or work information *63% collect travel information *60% download images or photos *58% look up entertainment events *56% check the weather *xx% doing online investing

Number of years each took to reach 50 million users *Radio - 38 years *TV - 13 years *Cable - 10 years *Internet - 5 years *(Source - Morgan Stanley)

The average person each month usually visits 59 domains, views 1,050 pages averaging 45 seconds for each page and spend about 25 hours a month doing this! Each surfing session lasts approximately 51 minutes.

Over 82 percent of college graduates will search for careers and employment information online.

96% of users find web pages through friends, other pages and search engines - websites through magazines 64.3% (GVU).

85% of Fortune 500 companies now list their Internet Address in their advertising.

2007 Internet Statistic - Approximately 97.2 million women use the Internet in the United States, compared to 90.9 million men, according to research by eMarketer.

Lightning speed super fast Internet: “Grid” on its Way in near future

Internet speed is always a topic to be discussed amongst web surfers. The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) is working on a new super fast Internet infrastructure called Grid. CERN, the particle physics center based in Geneva that created the web, has built “the grid,” a replacement for the Internet is expected to be 10,000 times faster than the regular broadband speed.

“We are extremely excited about our experiment. It is the biggest experiment in the world and we hope we are going to understand all sorts of things like the origin of mass and what the dark matter in the universe is,” said theoretical physicist Professor Malcolm Fairbairn at CERN.

Ian Bird, project leader for CERN’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could “make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet. Also, by transmitting data at lightning speed, the “frozen screen” can be eliminated, since its cause is trying to handle too much information.

CERN has built Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. It took almost 15 years and $8 billion to construct for CERN. The LHC is located in a 27-km circular tunnel 100 meters below ground level outside Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria by analyzing 140m compounds, an undertaking that would have taken 420 years on a standard internet-linked PC.

The project will recreate what happens in nature all the time by sending protons crashing into each other. The main difference is that this time there are powerful detectors set up to monitor what exactly happens.

The whole idea of a super fast internet may soon come true, so that downloading and communication is made easier.

Source: Times Online

China has world’s largest number of internet users

Beijing: China has edged past the US in terms of the number of Internet users to reach the number one slot, a research firm said. China had reported the number of Internet users at 210 million by the end of last year, very close to 216 million of the US. But, “according to our calculations, China has already replaced the US as the country with most Internet users by the end of last month,” Liu Bin, an analyst at the Beijing-based research firm BDA was quoted as saying by the state-run China Daily.

The US remained at the topmost position since the inception of the internet in 1969 as a network of computers under the auspices of the US Department of Defense. BDA Chairman Duncan Clark said Chinas Internet population was driven by buoyant Economy, massive investments in broadband infrastructure and a strong consumer demand for online applications.

Government-backed research institution China Internet Network Information Centre said China moved to the second position by the end of 2002, when the number of its internet users exceeded 59.1 million. However, CNNIC said Chinas Internet penetration was a mere 16 per cent last year, lower than the world average of 19.1 per cent.

Source:Financial Express

UN WFP Internet Game: Creditable to feed poor across the world

New York: United Nation World Food Programme (WFP) has launched an internet game nearly six months ago has proved so popular that it has generated enough rice to feed 1.1 million people for a day across the world.

The game based on interactive vocabulary awards every player 20 grains of rice for each correct answer and hence the money raised through advertising is used to support rice donations.Thus it allows children concurrently to strengthen their vocabularies and help feed world’s hungry children.

Near around half of million people playing it daily, it has generated 21 billion grains of rice for WFP.The first recipients of the website’s aid were refugees from Myanmar taking shelter in Bangladesh. Ugandan school children and pregnant and nursing mothers in Cambodia were among other beneficiaries.

Next batch of rice will be distributed among Bhutanese refugees in Nepal.

“I never imagined that things would move this fast or that it would be such a success,” said the game’s creator John Breen, an online fundraising initiator from the United States.
“Quite apart from the actual amount of rice generated, Free Rice is a fantastic way of spreading the message about world hunger.”

A new audio function lets players hear how words are pronounced, and Breen said a team of lexographers is working to expand the database of 10,000 words. To scale up the game’s appeal to younger and non-native English speakers, visitors can now select the level of difficulty.

Touch Screen, Speech Wave for Computer Interaction in Future:Gates

People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.

“It’s one of the big bets we’re making,” he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company’s daily operations in July.

Microsoft expects that in five years more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members last week at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy, must become even more advanced.

“They’re dealing with so much information that . . . the need for machine learning to figure out what’s going on with that data is absolutely essential,” he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with researchers in other scientific areas “to help us understand where new inventions are necessary,” Gates said.