What's America's Web IQ?

SAN FRANCISCO – Eighty-three percent of Americans could correctly identify the man pictured above. But they didn't know that the Internet and the World Wide Web aren't the same thing.

Americans, it turns out, love to use the Internet and are pretty clear on the lore that surrounds it – except for some of the more technical bits, a survey of the nation's Web IQ found.

Most, 83%, knew Bill Gates on sight.

And 74% could correctly say which was bigger, a kilobyte or megabyte.

Sixty-nine percent even knew what URL stands for (it's a Uniform Resource Locator, for those not up on their Web terms.)

The results are from a national survey of Internet-using adults released Tuesday by the non partisan Pew Research Center.

You can test yourself on the Pew's quiz page.

Even though most didn't tweet, 82% of online Americans knew that hashtags are used on Twitter and 60% correctly answered that tweets are limited to 140 characters.

Given recent news coverage, it is perhaps not surprising that 61% of users correctly answered that Net Neutrality means equal treatment of digital content by internet service provider.

But the respondents weren't so good on the science and engineering concepts that underlie the technology they have been flocking to for over 20 years.

For example, just 34% knew what Moore's Law was.

That describes the number of transistors that can be put on a microchip, a figure that has been doubling approximately every two years since 1965—making ever-smaller electronic devices possible. It was first described by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel.

And only 23% of Americans realized that "the Internet" and "the World Wide Web" are not the same thing.

The Internet consists of the architecture and protocols that allow computers to communicate with each other. The first computers began to be linked together on it in a meaningful way in the early 1980s.

The World Wide Web, launched in 1990, is one of the applications that uses Internet architecture to give users access to web pages on computers connected to the network.

Pew surveyed 1,066 adult Internet users between September 12-18, 2014.

The full report is available online. It is part of an ongoing series Pew is doing commemorating the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web.