What is Internet

• Internet is a network of networks, linking computers to computers. Each runs software to provide or “serve” information and/or to access and view information. The Internet is the transport vehicle for the information store in files or documents found through or using the internet on another computer.

World Wide Web (I)

• WWW incorporates gopher, FTP, telnet, and e-mail. When you log onto the Internet using Netscape, Microsoft Explorer Mosaic, Macweb, and Netcruiser, Lynx (often used from slow modems because it does not display images, colors, or sound, text only) browser, you are viewing documents on the World Wide Web.

World Wide Web (II)

• The WWW functions using Hypertext, highlighted links to other documents on the Web.

Browsers

• Browsers are software programs that enable you to view WWW documents.

• The “translate” HTML-encoded files into the text, images, sounds, and other features you see.

Location

• URL -- Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address of any Web document.

• Http -- Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.

Domain

• In the US, common domains are “edu” education, “gov” government agency, “net” network related, “com” commerical, “org” non-profit and resarch organizations.

• Outside US, domains indicate country: “ca” Canada, “uk” United Kingdom, “au” Australia, “jp” Japan, “fr” France, etc.

Go / History

• Button in Netscape/Explorer Menu Bar at Top. Provides list of recent sites you visited, retained for the current session only. Click on any site in the list to return to the site.

Search Engines

• AltaVista -- Provides news, stock quotes and general interest zones.

• Upper case searches for an exact match.

• Lower case will match both upper and lower case

Search Engines

• HotBot -- Conduct your highly-specific Web search : audio or video files, or general web sites.

• Use quotes around words that must appear as a phrase

• “*” Automatically searches for words with same root spelling.

Search Engines

• Excite -- http://www.excite.com/

• Use quotes around words that must appear as a phrase

• capitalize words are considered to be proper nouns, are searched as phrases.

• “*” uses machine intelligence to find cross-referenced terms.

Search Engines

• Infoseek -- general directory with search engine, daily news, weather and sports : search by word association.

• Use quotes or hyphenate phrase, capitalize names and titles, use commas to separate lists of names.

• “*” Automatically searches for words with same root spelling.

Search Engines

• Northern Light -- Allows users to refine a search and to shift through journal, book and industry data. http://www.northernlight.com

• Lycos -- http://www.lycos.com/index.html

Search Engines

• Yahoo -- http://www.yahoo.com

• use quotes for phrase searching

• “*” use after 3 or more letters to get words with up to 5 additional lower case letters

• t: restricts to titles/u: restricts to urls

Boolean Search Logic

• Combine Terms : “AND”, “OR”, “AND NOT”, “NEAR” -- requires all terms appear in a record.

• “OR” retrieves records with either term.

• “AND NOT” excludes terms

• Parentheses may be used to sequence operations and group words

Truncation in a Search

• Enter the first part of a keyword, insert a symbol *, and accept any variant spellings or word endings, from the occurrence of the symbol forward.

• Example femini* retrieves feminine, feminism, feminism, etc..