Database Structure of the World Wide Web

The Internet has become so large that it seems to have taken on a life of its own and many people are left scratching their heads and wondering what is the Internet in its current incarnation. In fact, the answer is simple. The Internet and World Wide Web remain the same thing as what they were when they were first created, only much larger. The answer is that the entire Internet is a database structure that is built as an interactive way to send and receive information. The give and take makes it an active database and millions of people contribute every day to the expansion of the database system.

A database structure is meant to be an architecture that allows information to be organized in a reasonable manner. In this perspective, the World Wide Web actually fails considerably. The enormous volume of information is constantly in flux, meaning that creating a true database structure for the information is largely impossible. The best solution has been to create systems of hyperlinks that connect websites with each other and with larger search engines. These search engines serve as the database system, but the existence of multiple search engines means that there is no official governing structure to the database.

In contrast, the basic technical setup of the Internet and World Wide Web does follow a discernible pattern. Users and computers access websites by using a DNS server that should provide a comprehensive list of the websites. By querying the IP address of the websites, information is requested and then returned through this DNS server. Therefore, the idea of the Internet does work as a database structure, albeit not a very elegant one. Future organizing of the Internet will be aimed at linking the websites in a coherent manner that aids in retrieval of the information.