Internet Trivia
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126 free Internet trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 126 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What word was a UCLA programmer typing in 1969 when the ARPANET system crashed after two letters?
login
Login: only the 'l' and the 'o' went through before the crash, so the network's first message was 'lo'; a full login worked about an hour later.
Q 02Which US government department funded the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet?
Department of Defense
Department of Defense: the network was paid for by its Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had been set up in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
Q 03The first successful host-to-host ARPANET connection in 1969 linked UCLA with which other site?
Stanford Research Institute
Stanford Research Institute: Douglas Engelbart's lab there went on to run the network's information center, which kept the table of host names and addresses.
Q 04Who created the email addressing format separating mailbox name from host name with an @ sign, in 1971?
Ray Tomlinson
Ray Tomlinson: he picked the @ sign because it never appeared in usernames and naturally read as 'user at host'.
Q 05Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
CERN: to win over staff, the lab put its telephone directory on the Web, and that dull listing became the new system's first popular use.
Q 06Godwin's law says that as an online argument grows longer, someone will eventually be compared to whom?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler: yet in 2017 Mike Godwin himself urged people to compare the far-right marchers in Charlottesville to Nazis.
Q 07At which event did Tim Berners-Lee live-tweet the words 'This is for everyone'?
London Olympics
London Olympics: the words also lit up around the stadium, spelled out in lights across the audience.
Q 08What does the 'S' in HTTPS stand for?
Secure
Secure: in 2014 Google began using HTTPS as a signal in its search rankings, giving encrypted sites a small boost.
Q 09NCSA Mosaic, the 1993 browser that popularised the Web, was built at which Midwestern university?
Illinois
Illinois: Marc Andreessen, who co-wrote Mosaic there, left to co-found Netscape, maker of the rival Navigator browser.
Q 10Which web browser reached a peak usage share of about 95% in 2003?
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer: by 2010 its share had sunk below 60%, as Firefox and Google Chrome drew users away.
Q 11Mozilla's Firefox browser launched in 2002 under the name of which mythical bird?
Phoenix
Phoenix: trademark trouble forced a switch to Firebird, and when a database project with that name objected, the browser became Firefox.
Q 12Google built its Chrome browser on WebKit, a rendering engine from which company?
Apple
Apple: in 2013 Google broke away and forked WebKit into its own engine, Blink, which Chrome still runs on.
Q 13Which animal do you play as in the game Google Chrome shows when you're offline?
A T. rex
A T. rex: its designer said the dinosaur was a joke that losing your connection sends you back to the 'prehistoric age'.
Q 21What was Amazon's original company name?
Cadabra
Cadabra: Bezos changed it within months, after his lawyer raised objections to the name.
Q 22Jeff Bezos moved from New York City to which Washington city to start Amazon as an online bookstore?
Bellevue
Bellevue: Bezos and a handful of employees built the site in his garage there before it sold its first book in July 1995.
Q 23What was the first item ever sold on eBay's predecessor AuctionWeb, in 1995?
A broken laser pointer
A broken laser pointer: it fetched $14.83 from a buyer who knew it didn't work.
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
Susan Wojcicki: their landlord later joined Google herself and went on to become YouTube's CEO.
Q 16Google's first outside investment, a $100,000 cheque in 1998, came from a co-founder of which company?
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems: co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim handed over the cheque before Google Inc. had even been incorporated.
Q 17The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?
Burning Man
Burning Man: that out-of-office note started a tradition that had grown to more than 5,000 Doodles by 2024.
Q 18In 2015 Google reorganised itself as a subsidiary of which newly created parent company?
Alphabet
Alphabet: in the same shake-up Sundar Pichai became Google's CEO, while Larry Page moved up to lead the parent company.
Q 19Who launched Wikipedia in 2001 together with Larry Sanger?
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales: the wiki first went online under his older encyclopedia's web address, then moved to its own site within days.
Q 20Wikipedia began as a side project feeding into which expert-written online encyclopaedia?
Nupedia
Nupedia: its expert review was so slow that fewer than two dozen articles were finished by January 2001, when the wiki was started to speed things up.
Q 24Yahoo's name is often explained as a backronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious' what?
Oracle
Oracle: yet Jerry Yang and David Filo say they chose the name because they liked its meaning, 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'.
Q 25Which classifieds website began as an email service about events in the San Francisco Bay Area?
Craigslist
Craigslist: Craig Newmark's email service later became a website that spread to hundreds of cities worldwide.
Q 26YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
PayPal: Google later bought the trio's new company, YouTube, for $1.65 billion.
Q 27'Me at the zoo', the first YouTube video, uploaded in April 2005, was filmed at which zoo?
San Diego Zoo
San Diego Zoo: in 2013 the clip's star, co-founder Jawed Karim, went on YouTube to protest its new rule tying comments to Google+.
Q 28Which video first reached a billion YouTube views, in December 2012?
Gangnam Style
Gangnam Style: its views later outgrew the biggest number YouTube's 32-bit view counter could store, so the site upgraded it.
Q 29When 'TheFacebook' launched on 4 February 2004, it was open only to students of which university?
Harvard
Harvard: months earlier, Mark Zuckerberg's site Facemash, which asked students to rate classmates' looks, had landed him in trouble with the university.
Q 30Facebook's thumbs-up Like button, introduced in 2009, had been popularised earlier on which social site?
FriendFeed
FriendFeed: after borrowing the feature, Facebook bought FriendFeed itself that August.