http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/cit_internet_on_a_disk.jpg

--> ''I want to download the Internet. Do I need a bigger hard disk?''

Even though the Internet has technically (kinda, sorta) existed since the 1960s, not everyone foresaw the impact it would have. And writers ''still'' seem to have trouble getting their heads around it.

One result is that it is totally absent from many shows set TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture.

Another is that TV shows never seem to really grasp just how ''big'' the Internet is.

One example of this is that Google comes off as a MagicalDatabase: on the first try with a search engine, you will either get all the relevant documents and no irrelevant documents, or you will get a canonical response that the thing you're looking for does not exist on the Internet. Never has someone typed something in and gotten ten billion mostly irrelevant hits (well, almost never -- see examples). And one false click never buries you in a quicksand pit of [[TheInternetIsForPorn porn popups.]]

Another is that there is exactly one instant messaging service. And everyone is a subscriber. And everyone knows everyone else's handle. You can message anyone you want at any time without having to install new software, subscribe to a new service, or even search for their screen name.

And speaking of screen names, everyone gets something short, pithy, relevant, and unique. No one is ever "[=JAnderson789=]" or "[=buffyfan2001=]". Even if you want a short, really hip handle, it will be available as if it were reserved for you. And no one names themselves after characters from other TV shows. Also, everyone has exactly one online identity, which is their email address, instant messaging handle, their handle on every bulletin board, and the name they use on [=UseNet=] (caveat: [=UseNet=] never actually exists on TV, except for [[TheSimpsons alt.nerd.obsessive]]). You'll never run into someone who uses the same handle as you on a different service (There is, after all, only the one service. In TV Land, AOL ''is'', as they claim, the Internet). Email addresses rarely include a domain name.
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!!Examples

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Anime ]]

* ''AzumangaDaioh'' plays a DoubleSubversion on this one. Late in the series, Sakaki types in a search engine "cats", a super-generic search term, and gets thousands and thousands of random matches; then she types "Iriomote cat", also a rather generic search term, and it looks like one of the very first matches is a news article about [[spoiler:an Iriomote mountain cat that died after getting run over by a car, who also seems to be Mayaa's mother.]]
** [[spoiler:Note that the Iriomote cat is a very endangered species found only in Japan with a population of under 100. A news item about such a rare animal being killed by a car would likely rank highly in most search engines as a very popular news story.]]
* Played straight in episode 4 of ''ToAruKagakuNoRailgun'', where some characters look up the urban legend of "The Undressing Woman" on the internet. Immediately they found several websites dedicated to the myth, but there's no mention of any [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean other sites]]. Sure, adding "urban legend" to the search criteria might help, but searching for "undressing woman" is still gonna link you to [[TheInternetIsForPorn a lot of porn.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* In the Russian movie ''NightWatch'', the Night Watch's analyst uses a popular search engine's "search the future" functionality to search for "accidents in Moscow". The search returns exactly one result: a yet-to-happen plot-relevant plane crash, which the heroes then have to avert.
**Justified in that it is a magical extension of the database used by a race of wizards and shape-shifters who have already demonstrated genuine precognitive ability.
** The sequel ''DayWatch'' does avert this trope when dealing with computers. BigBad Zavulon's MSN Messenger handle is "zavulon1@hotmail.com", with a number, and his username is "Z@vulon", with a symbol unusual for fictional usernames.
**An odd aversion, that. "Zavulon" seems like one name that ''wouldn't'' already be taken.
* The horror series ''FinalDestination'' shows this trope in the sequels. In ''FinalDestination 2'', a character uses a generic search engine to search for "Flight 180," the doomed flight from the first film, and instantly finds what he's looking for. A bit justified, as it is established in the movie that the events of the first movie are well known in the movie world, though usually dismissed as an urban legend. A bit more egregious is a scene where a character finds directions to an insane asylum with a Google maps stand in ''without typing in her location.''
** In the third movie, one of the characters says he did some searching on the Internet. The search isn't actually shown, probably due to the fact that the character wasn't actually looking up Flight 180, but rather "premonitions." It actually wouldn't be very surprising, given that the events of the first movie are so well known in the world of Final Destination, if there was a Wikipedia article on it, which Google would place up top of a "Flight 180" search.
* In the movie ''MissionImpossible'', Ethan Hunt does an Internet search (which appears to be a Usenet search) for "Job," as in the Biblical character. This turns up nothing. He then modifies the search to "Book of Job," and finds what he was looking for. It would have been considerably more accurate and amusing if his first search, instead of turning up nothing, had come up with hundreds of thousands of listings submitted by employment agencies and resume services.
* The remake of ''{{Carrie}}'' subverts this. When Carrie does a search for "miracles" so that she could learn about her psychic powers, she has to dig through a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what she's looking for (including a site advertising "miracle underwear"). Still, she's able to find the information she needs without having to go to the second page.
* Early in the film ''{{Wanted}}'' (and [[http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/jun/20/wantedforcrimesagainstcine also in one of its trailers]]), James [=McAvoy's=] character Googles himself (without quotation marks!), and, in an illustration of how insignificant his life is, no results are returned. So apparently no pages on the in-film Internet contain either the words "Wesley" or "Gibson"...
** Note, however, that before the character in question [[TookALevelInBadass takes a level in badass,]] his own ''daydreams'' insult him; for example, when he checks his bank balance at an ATM machine, the machine itself calls him a loser via its text display. The terribly demoralizing Google search could just be another instance of this.
* Averted in ''{{Catwoman}}'', of all places. When Halle Berry looks up "cats" on Google, she gets a ton of irrelevant hits of little old ladies dressing their pet cats in ridiculous costumes. She then tries the more specific search "cat worship"; although this does cue a creepy plot-relevant montage of cat cults throughout history, the images she gets are believably of the sort you'd expect to get if you tried to search that on Google.
* Averted in ''{{Scary Movie}} 3''. When Cindy is searching the internet for information on a plot-relevant location, the audience sees her face express fear and horror as a creepy melody plays in the background. Naturally everyone assumes she has found the information... until the camera shows the screen, revealing that her "horror" comes from the fact that popups are spawning faster than she can click them away.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* In one of the books based on the ''PurpleMoon'' series, Mavis' Internet buddy that 'lives in Chicago' is actually one of her classmates. When she learns about this, she refuses to believe it.
** However, nobody's email address is short or interesting... but in TheNineties, [[CyclicTrope they were supposed to be]] random words slightly connected to the character and accompanied by numbers.
* Scarlett Thomas's ''The End of Mr. Y'' had this as a minor plot point: When Ariel Manto bought the box full of books, the salesperson blogged about her. This posting is immediately indexed by a search engine and used by the antagonists to locate her. Also the amount of hits for the title of the book is strangely low and irrelevant links seem to be missing.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Comic Book ]]

* When [[SpiderMan Spider-man]] revealed his identity as Peter Parker to the world, the ensuing amount of people googling "Peter Parker" brought down ''the entire Internet''. Yes, even the porn sites.
* In ''FinalCrisis'' it took Oracle a series of key strokes to shut down the Internet.
** You're surprised that someone trained by {{Batman}} had a way of shutting down the Internet [[CrazyPrepared figured out in advance]]?

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* ''[[Series/WarOfTheWorlds War of the Worlds]]'': Kinkaid's handle is "Rogue". Other people on the network are "Lonelyheart" and "Ace". The Internet has a total population of about six. (To be fair, the Internet ''was'' a much smaller place in 1988.)
* ''SoWeird'': Fiona's handle is "Rockerbaby" (she's the daughter of two rock stars).
* ''JoanOfArcadia'': Luke's handle is "gravity_boy", a rare example of an underscore on TV.
* An early episode of ''LawAndOrder'' had detectives discovering the identity of a hacker because his screen name was "[=SlapShot=]" and the suspect was a NY Ranger's hockey fan. Apparently, only one hockey fan in all of Manhattan had a computer with Internet access. (No jokes about the actual number of hockey fans in Manhattan or in the American general public, please.)
** Cop shows like ''LawAndOrder'' and similar shows (''{{CSI}}'' and ''{{NCIS}}'', I'm looking at you) will throw in every stereotype they can that fits under this trope, [[DidNotDoTheResearch for a variety]] [[TheyJustDidntCare of reasons]].
* When (on ''TheWestWing'') Josh posted to lemonlyman.com, no one stopped to consider the possibility that anyone other than the real White House Deputy Chief of Staff would post under his name. Granted, the whole affair was based on what happened to Aaron Sorkin when he posted to the forums on [[http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com Television Without Pity]]...
** This contrasts strongly with a RealLife incident where ''[[BabylonFive Babylon 5]]'''s Claudia Christian posted to a ''[=B5=]'' discussion group, only to be chased off by the regulars as an allegedly clumsy and unconvincing impersonation!
*** David Duchovny claimed the same thing happened to him in an ''[[TheXFiles X-Files]]'' chatroom.
*** MaxBarry claimed it happened to him in the NationStates chatroom.
*** This happens [[OnceAnEpisode Once A Week]] on the ''[[TheColbertReport Colbert Report]]'' forums. General consensus is that either no-one is Stephen, or everyone is; one theory is that Stephen is amusing himself by trolling his own fans and ''pretending'' to be poor impersonations of himself. [[AlterEgoActing Given who we're talking about here]], it's entirely possible.
*** In the 90's, Phish's bassist Mike Gordon logged into a Phish chat room on AOL under the nick "[=FakeMike=]". People would ask him questions like, "If you are Mike, what are the chords to 'Bathtub Gin?'" or something but he had a mental block and couldn't think of any of the right answers.
* In ''CSIMiami'', "Urban Hellraisers", the team is unable to get the details of the plot of a [[FictionalCounterpart GTA-alike]] from its developer, and therefore has to resort to playing the game themselves to work out the storyline that a group of criminals is re-enacting. It seems that walkthrough sites don't exist on the CSI-universe Internet. Similarly, there's no such thing as a SavePoint or CheckPoint, since they had to start the game over from the beginning every time they lost.
** A similar event happens in a ''LawAndOrderSVU'' episode, where two detectives -- and later their captain -- play a game enjoyed by a reclusive child who is also a murder suspect. Though, to be fair, they did seem to be playing it because they actually enjoyed the game.
* An episode of ''ArrestedDevelopment'' shows a Google search for "Sacremende" generating no results, not even a typo. Careful examination of the frame reveals an unprintable character inserted after the word to force this result.
** Somewhat justified in that searching for Sacremende even now only brings up pages related to ''ArrestedDevelopment'', and that episode was done before Google really started their "did you mean" function at the top of bad searches.
* This editor was amused by an episode of ''{{CSI}}'' where the writers assumed that instant messaging automatically retained a log of user conversations. Also, how from a stored IM session they were able to pull up an IP address. Not necessarily impossible on either count... but definitely not as easy (especially for the latter) as it looked.
** Several IM clients automatically log all conversations, so the user can, for example, search for an URL he received from a buddy a few months ago instead of asking the buddy whether he still has the URL. (This Troper has used the history function in Trillian, ICQ (both Pro and Lite), Miranda and Pidgin/Gaim.)
** While in school this editor was told by a policewoman who came to talk to us that MSN, AIM, and most other IM services keep a log of all messages sent for several years after they were sent (at least) and give them to the authorites on request. Scary stuff, even if she was exaggerating (quite likely).
*** The AIM one is accurate, at least. There was a scandal a while back where numerous AIM logs were leaked to the public by accident.
*** If you're worried about this, you can use Pidgin and a plugin called "OTR (Off The Record) messaging". This encrypts your IMs. There are lots of gotchas with this, (all your friends must use Pidgin and OTR, the chat histories on both sides are still stored in plaintext and more)... so use Google and understand how it works before trusting it.
* In a hilariously ridiculous example from ''{{iCarly}}'', Freddy, Carly and Sam look up "chicks" (as in baby chickens) on the Internet. Everyone watching probably knew that anyone searching for ''chicks'' on Google probably... wouldn't find baby chicken on the first page, let alone the first slot. Made even more hilarious by the fact the site they go to is called chicks.net, a giant website all about baby chicks.
** Pity they didn't just try to wing it from the URL bar; http://www.chick.com is a fun site, and could use the publicity.
** RealityIsUnrealistic here; Googling "chicks" does in fact give a website about chickens in the top three. And the actual Chicks.net has nothing to do with poultry ''or'' porn.
*** For the curious, it's the personal website of Christopher Hicks.
*** And they actually went on a site called Chickipedia, which is in reality the name of a wiki of hot women.
** And that's not even getting into the numbers of hits and comments (none of which seem to be "OMG U SUXORZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!") their webcast gets.
*** When you think about it, it seems that their webcast is the center of the internet.
**** granted that in the TVMovie ''iGo to Japan'', the plot is that there are entered for [[spoiler: and eventually win]] an award for "Best webshow", so an unusually large number of hits or comments may be justified.
* ''{{How I Met Your Mother}}'' pushes this a bit, with websites and domain names set up with apparent ease. A timer-based countdown to a date isn't so implausible, even if the characters haven't mentioned any specific knowledge of how computers work, but setting up an online shop overnight seems a little bit dodgy.
** There are quite a few websites that let you do just that, Cafepress for one, and with basic knowledge of their API you can indeed set up something half decent overnight.
** You can buy a domain name from any number of companies using a credit card, and have it pointing at a website within just a few hours (the time-delay due to the machinations of the internet Domain Name System).
* In an episode of ''{{Psych}}'', known for eye-line matches to objects that glow when fake-psychic Shawn looks at them, Shawn deduces that the murder victim was secretly a well-known on-line comic book critic by noticing random, non-consecutive letters in the blogger's screen name.
** In another episode, Gus recognizes a missing poker player's screen name from an online poker site because he too plays online poker. Apparently there is only one online poker site in existence, and it's small enough that someone would recognize the name of another random player.
* Parodied on ''TimAndEricAwesomeShowGreatJob'' with "The Innernette," which is contained on one CD-ROM.
* Also parodied on ''TheITCrowd'', where Roy and Moss convince Jen that the entire Internet is contained in a small black box that is usually kept atop Big Ben. They do this so that Jen will humiliate herself during a speech to the company shareholders, but are horrified when everyone at the meeting believes what she's saying is true...and then pleased again when the "Internet" is destroyed, and [[HilarityEnsues pandemonium breaks out]].
* ''DefyingGravity'' One of the astronauts explains how they've fit hundreds of movies and YouTube into their computer's databank. Yes, all of You Tube.
* Averted a couple of times on ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer''.
-->'''BUFFY:''' Maybe The First isn't ready for modern technology. (Googles "evil") "Displaying results 1 through 10 of 900,517." OK, I gotta narrow this down. I'll call you back.
* "Rose", the first episode of the ''DoctorWho'' revival, averts this to some extent -- when she searches the Net for "The Doctor", of course all it brings up are medical sites. ("Doctor blue box" is apparently specific enough, though).

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

* Parodied on ''{{Minoriteam}}'', when the BigBad attempts to discover the heroes' secret identities by simply typing "Secret Identities" into an Internet search engine. It would have worked, if not for ExplosiveOverclocking. (An actual Google search for "secret identities" returns the Wikipedia article on the concept, which links to a ridiculously complete list of DC Comics secret identities, as its first result. Other results are links to less complete lists from other universes.)
* Subverted by the ''{{PVP}}'' animated series when first page of search engine results for "sky" are (as they had hoped) sites about naked women skydiving.
* Parodied in an episode of ''{{Futurama}}'':
--> "Shut up, friends! My Internet browser heard us saying the word "Fry" and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us. It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some French fries."
* Hit by ''{{The Venture Bros}}'' in the season three episode "ORB", when trying to decipher a riddle written about a century ago. Pete White, computer expert and probably half-Author Avatar, just googles the clues, quickly determining that "Minuit's Bargain" is New York City. After commenting on how the poor chump who came up with the riddle never would've expected them to have the Internet, he proceeds to derail the plan by searching for "The house that Coke built" and somehow coming up with Studio 54.
* When the ''KimPossible'' villains [[DarkActionGirl Shego]] and [[MinionWithAnFInEvil Sr. Sr. Jr.]] searched for something really valuable and heavily guarded, Junior suggested that they would search the Internet for the words "really valuable" and "heavily guarded." It worked. For [[YouSuck Ron]], too.
** Searching Google for "Really Valuable" "Heavily guarded" returns that particular episode.
*** As of right now, the first result is ''this page''.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

* The SNES version of ''{{Shadowrun}}'' pre-dates wireless networking, but apparently not ''{{Minesweeper}}'', hence the maze-like minigames.
* Averted in ''ChaosHead'' when Takumi tries looking up NOZOMI and reasonably enough gets tons of useless results since, for all he knows, it could merely be the nurse's first name.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Web Original ]]

*Played with by the SCPFoundation's [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-335 SCP-335]]: The entire Internet on 150 floppy discs. How this fit on there is unknown, which is why the Foundation is interested in the discs in the first place.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Webcomics ]]

* In the ''SluggyFreelance'' mini-arc "[[http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=090110&mode=weekly Interweb with the Vampire]]" the fictional email/instant message service ''Grab-All'' plays this trope big time. Aside from Torg and Sam having the screen names "Torg" and "Sam," ''Grab-All's'' search engine is a little ... extensive.
-->'''Sam:''' Not just mail (...) you can keep your passwords, private documents, financial information, medical records, and skeletons-in-your-closet all in one handy location accessible from any online computer!

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

* The standard fictional search engine used on British TV is [[http://www.search-wise.net Search-Wise.net]], which you can visit, but can't actually use -- this may be connected to the FiveFiveFive-equivalent in the ''BritishPostalAndTelephoneSystem''.
* In Mexico, ''everybody'' uses MSN Hotmail, MSN Spaces, and MSN Messenger. AIM, ICQ and Jabber are almost unheard of, Gmail is pretty much reserved to computer geeks, and Myspace is usually used by amateur bands.
** Same thing in the Middle East, except replace "MSN Spaces" with Facebook, and Gmail is becoming fairly popular recently.
*** 80% of all people between 16 and 40 in Iceland have a facebook account.
*** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyworld Apparently]] 25% of people in South Korea have a Cyworld account.
* The British government is currently considering setting up a system that can monitor and record nearly all Internet activity in Britain. Whether they can actually pull this off or not remains to be seen.
** Jury's out. On the one hand, the British government is usually successful in [[ItGetsWorse making things worse]] for the nation, but also have about a [[EpicFail 100% failure rate]] for any ambitious project.
* [[LokiFenrisulfIV This troper]] is one of the few people in Brazil that doesn't use Orkut all the time (for personal dislike of it). MSN is also used by almost everyone, as is Gmail.

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