What is an IP?

Since there are literally billions of web pages around the world, a web surfer needs to know the unique location of each webpage on the Internet in order to access them.

Fortunately a reliable system has been built to allow specific addressing, which identifies individual websites around the world. This is done using IP addressing, which takes the form of numbers. For example, the IP address of Yahoo is 66.218.71.81, which uniquely identifies Yahoo.com from all the other websites. If you type http://66.218.71.81 (*) in the address box of the browser you will navigate straight to the home page of Yahoo.com.

Luckily you don't have to remember the IP address of each website, since a central body has been set up to provide names readable against IP addresses. For example, if you wanted to have your own website, you could try registering the (domain) name like www.yourbusinessname.com. If the name is available it will be mapped to the IP address of your server where you hold your web pages.

Page 7: Search Engines