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80 free Internet trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These 73 internet trivia questions with answers cover the story of the network itself, from the 1969 ARPANET message that crashed after two letters to the browser wars, the dot-com bubble and the sites that now define online life. You will meet the first .com domain, the first webcam, the first spam message and the first YouTube video, along with the origins of words we use every day: cookie, spam, blog, podcast, Wi-Fi. It is written for anyone who grew up online, or watched it happen: pub quiz teams, tech workers, teachers and trivia-night hosts who want questions people argue about rather than dry dates. Difficulty runs from easy (which company bought YouTube?) to hard (who coined 'packet switching'?). Every answer is sourced to a specific reference page, quoted in the question's source note, and every question has one clear correct answer and three plausible wrong ones. Play it as an internet trivia game with friends, or work through it solo and see how much of the web's history you actually know.
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Q 01What word was the operator typing when the first ARPANET message, sent from UCLA in 1969, crashed after two letters?
login
Charley Kline got as far as 'l' and 'o' before the SDS 940 at Stanford Research Institute went down; the full word went through about an hour later.
Q 02In which year were the first computers connected to the ARPANET, the network that grew into the Internet?
1969
Four university sites were linked that first year, and the Network Control Program that made real applications possible arrived in 1970.
Q 03The first successful host-to-host ARPANET connection in 1969 linked UCLA with which other institution?
Stanford Research Institute
Utah and UC Santa Barbara were the other two of the four original nodes, but the historic first link ran up the California coast to SRI in Menlo Park.
Q 04Who created the email addressing format separating mailbox name from host name with an @ sign, in 1971?
Ray Tomlinson
Tomlinson was working at BBN on the ARPANET when he picked the @ sign, a character that conveniently never appeared in anyone's name.
Q 05Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
He wanted a way for physicists at the Geneva laboratory to share documents across incompatible computers, and hypertext over the Internet was his answer.
Q 06The first website, published by Tim Berners-Lee on 20 December 1990, was about what?
The World Wide Web project itself
It explained what the Web was and how to use it, which made it both the first website and the first user manual for the Web.
Q 07In which year was the World Wide Web's protocol and code released royalty-free?
1993
The decision on 30 April of that year is a big reason the Web, rather than a proprietary rival, became the face of the Internet.
Q 08What was the name of the very first web browser, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990?
WorldWideWeb
It ran only on NeXT computers and doubled as an editor, so it was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the Web itself.
Q 09NCSA Mosaic, the browser credited with popularising the Web in 1993, was developed at which university?
Illinois
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina wrote it at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Andreessen soon left to co-found Netscape.
Q 10Which web browser reached a peak usage share of about 95% in 2003?
Internet Explorer
Bundling it with Windows crushed Netscape in the first browser war, and it took Firefox and later Chrome to break the near-monopoly.
Q 11Firefox was created in 2002 under which codename, a nod to rising from the ashes of Netscape?
Phoenix
A trademark claim from Phoenix Technologies forced a rename in 2003, and the browser went through one more name before settling on Firefox.
Q 12In which year did Google launch the Chrome browser?
2008
It arrived in September for Windows only, built partly on Apple's WebKit engine, and within a few years it was the world's most used browser.
Q 13Google announced Chrome to journalists in 2008 with a comic book drawn by which cartoonist?
Scott McCloud
The 38-page comic reached a German blogger two days early and was scanned online, so Google moved the launch forward a day.
Q 21Amazon was founded on 5 July 1994 under what original name?
Cadabra
Bezos dropped the magic-themed name within months, partly because it sounded too much like 'cadaver' over the phone.
Q 22Jeff Bezos moved from New York City to which Washington city to start Amazon as an online bookstore?
Bellevue
The Seattle suburb is where the famous garage was; decades later Amazon built a 43-storey tower there for 15,000 staff.
Q 23What was the first item ever sold on eBay's predecessor AuctionWeb, in 1995?
A broken laser pointer
It went for $14.83, and the winning bidder assured founder Pierre Omidyar that he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 14What was Google nicknamed while it was still a Stanford research project?
BackRub
The name referred to the way it analysed backlinks; the founders later renamed it after the number googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Q 15When Google was set up in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used whose garage as an office?
Susan Wojcicki
Their landlord later joined Google herself and went on to run YouTube.
Q 16Google's first outside investment, a $100,000 cheque in 1998, came from a co-founder of which company?
Sun Microsystems
Andy Bechtolsheim reportedly wrote the cheque to 'Google Inc.' before the company legally existed, which forced Page and Brin to incorporate.
Q 17The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?
Burning Man
The stick figure behind the logo was an out-of-office note in case the servers crashed while Page and Brin were in the Nevada desert.
Q 18In 2015 Google reorganised itself as a subsidiary of which newly created parent company?
Alphabet
Sundar Pichai took over as Google's CEO in the same shake-up, while Larry Page moved up to run the parent.
Q 19Wikipedia was launched on 15 January of which year?
2001
The date is now celebrated as Wikipedia Day; the site began as a single English edition at wikipedia.com.
Q 20Wikipedia began as a side project feeding into which expert-written online encyclopaedia?
Nupedia
The older project's articles were reviewed under a formal expert process, which was so slow that the open wiki quickly overtook it.
Q 24Yahoo's name is often explained as a backronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchically Organized' what?
Oracle
Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo say they really picked it because they liked the word's slang meaning of 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'.
Q 25Craigslist began in 1995 as what?
An email list of San Francisco events
Craig Newmark, new to the Bay Area, was simply telling friends about local happenings; the list only became a website later.
Q 26YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim had cashed out when eBay bought their old employer, which funded the video site.
Q 27'Me at the zoo', the first YouTube video, uploaded in April 2005, was filmed at which zoo?
San Diego Zoo
The 19-second clip shows co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants.
Q 28How much did Google pay for YouTube in November 2006?
$1.65 billion
It was an all-stock deal for a company that was barely 20 months old and had yet to turn a profit.
Q 29When 'TheFacebook' launched on 4 February 2004, it was open only to students of which university?
Harvard
It spread to other Ivy League and Boston-area colleges within weeks, then to universities across North America.
Q 30Facebook's thumbs-up Like button, introduced in 2009, had been popularised earlier on which social site?
FriendFeed
Facebook liked the feature so much it bought the company that pioneered it later the same year.