What happens when you type ‘https://www.google.

com’ in your browser and press ‘Enter’

When a website is typed into the search bar of a browser and the ‘Enter’ key is clicked, a series of
interactive processes is initiated within fractions of a seconds to give response to the end user.

These series of interactive processes can be divided into three stages:

 What happens on the client side (The browser, the DNS and the Operating System).
 What happens on the internet
 What happens on the server side of the google.com application.

This article will focus on using the stages listed above to expand on the topic. However before we delve
into these processes, let us talk about the Internet and world wide web because these concepts forms
the foundation of this article.

 The World Wide Web

Te world wide web is an application that runs on top of the internet. It is a collection of web pages
connected through hyperlinks and URLs.

It was first developed by Tim Berner Lee who first proposed the idea in 1989. By the end of 1990, he
developed the full web suite which include a web page, a browser, a web server, the uniform resource
identifier and the hypertext transfer protocol.

The world wide web is just one of the applications of the internet. Other applications of the internet
include email applications, file transfer applications and chatting applications like facebook, slack and
video streaming like youtube, netflix.

 The Internet

The internet is a global interconnection of networks that makes online communication between users
possible. The internet is the hardware part of the web technolody since it consists of routers, copper
wires, fibre optics and wireless connections.

The internet is governed by the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

 The difference between the world wide web and the internet

The internet is made up of mostly hardware technologies while the world wide web is made up of
mainly software technologies.
The internet is governed by the internet protocol (IP) while the world wide web is governed by the
hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). IP and HTTP sits on the network and application layer of the OSI and
TCP framework respectively.

The world wide web will not be possible without the internet while the internet can exist without the
world wide web. Users will still be able to chat, transfer files and email themselves without the world
wide web.

When a user uses a browser to surf the web, he or she is using the world wide web but when using an
application like gmail or skype, then you are said to be using the internet.

Typing ‘https://www.google.com’ into the web browser.

 What happens on the client side

 What happens on the Internet
 What happens on the server side of the google.com application

Conclusions