People say "the internet" and "the web" as if they mean the same thing. They don't! One is the giant network of cables and wifi that joins computers all over the world. The other is one popular thing that runs on top of it — the websites you look at in a browser. Getting the difference straight is one of those little facts that suddenly makes the whole of computing click into place.
Here's the quickest way to remember it:
Imagine your whole town is joined up by roads. The roads don't sell anything and they aren't a shop — they're just how you get from place to place. The internet is like that road system: it connects everything, but it isn't the thing you actually came for.
The web is like the shops you drive to along those roads. When you open a website, you're "driving" to one shop. But shops aren't the only place on the roads! You can also drive to the post office (that's like email), to a friend's house (a video call), or to the arcade (playing games online). All of them use the same roads — the internet — but they are different destinations.
So the web is not "the internet". The web is one very busy, very popular set of shops on the internet's roads.
In the picture below, the big band along the bottom is the internet — the cables and wifi joining all our devices. Sitting on top of it are several different services: the World Wide Web, email, video calls and online games. Step through and watch each one plug into the same internet underneath.
Notice that the web is just one box among several — big and popular, but only one. Take the web away and the internet is still there, happily carrying your emails, calls and games.
A handy clue is the address. When you visit a page on the web, its address usually
starts with http or https and you type it into a
browser (like the one you're using right now). The www you sometimes
see at the front of an address is a nod to those three words: World Wide Web.
But if you send a message to friend@example.com, that's email — a
completely different service, even though it also travels over the internet. And when you're on a
video call or in an online game, no web page is involved at all. Same roads, different journeys.
The internet grew up first — its early roads were being connected back in the 1960s and 70s. The World Wide Web came much later: a scientist called Tim Berners-Lee invented it around 1989–1991 so that researchers could share documents by clicking links between them. In other words, the roads existed for about twenty years before anyone built the web on top of them — more proof that they really are two different things!
"The internet" and "the web" are not the same thing. The web is just one popular service that runs on the internet — the websites you view in a browser. Email, video calls and online games also use the internet but are not part of the web. So it's fine to say "I'm on the internet", but saying "the internet is where websites live" mixes up the roads with the shops. The internet is the network; the web is one thing riding on it.