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Why is it called a "Web" Site?

I have been studying computer science, it's a very new topic to me so I'm stumbling around here and there trying to fully understand it.

So from what I understand it works like this:

A group of computer systems working together, following a set of rule (a protocol), is known as a network.

There is a global network of computer networks, known as the internet (international network), which is the largest network in this world, that the majority of people connect to in order to access data (can range from Emails, to Social media, to Educational material, to entertainment).

Data is stored by the administrator of the network (i.e. Mark Zuckeberg stores all of FaceBook's data) in a database storage server. Which different computer systems can access provided they have connection to that database storage server and the protocol permits access.

The World Wide Web, aka The Web, is simply the format for which all of the massive Networks, IXPs, are connected to each other via core routers (aka Internet backbone?).

From what I understood, the Web doesn't really store anything, it's simply the format for data transferring from network to network through the internet via routers. The actual location of the accessed data are the servers.

Why is it called a Website then? And not a DB Server Site? Or even Internet Site? Am I misunderstanding something? That's like instead of asking for someone's address you ask for their highway.

4 Answers

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  • 4 years ago
    Favourite answer

    The reason it is called the "web" is because bots (scripts or programs) called "spiders" crawled around the web like wires of the Internet following links searching for things for search engines to list quickly when you do a search. For example this is a list of some of the spider bots that were crawling around a CGI script I had on a website in 2005:

    Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)

    Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)

    Wells Search II

    ISC Systems iRc Search 2.1

    Missigua Locator 1.9

    FAST Enterprise Crawler/6 (www.fastsearch.com)

    msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

    NASA Search 1.0

    ConveraCrawler/0.4

    FAST Enterprise Crawler/6.3 (www.fastsearch.com)

    unchaos_crawler_2.0.2 search.engine@unchaos.com

  • Anonymous
    4 years ago

    Because it's much easier to tell non-techies they're accessing a web page, on a web site, on the World Wide Web, than it is to explain what a server or database is.

    Also, you really need to fill in more of those "fact gaps" that you have. Millions of web sites are just a collection of HTML pages without a database in sight.

  • 4 years ago

    Read the Wikipedia article to see if it helps.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

    By the way, I suspect you mean ISP (Internet Service Provider) rather than IXP.

    I hope this helps.

  • ?
    Lv 5
    4 years ago

    A website is a site found on the web.

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