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' As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the
greatest success in life. ' - Benjamin Disraeli
The Internet and Search Engines
The Internet
Until the advent of the World-Wide Web in 1990, the Internet was
almost entirely unknown outside universities and corporate research departments and was
accessed mostly via command line interfaces such as telnet and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
Since then it has grown
to become an almost-ubiquitous aspect of modern information systems, becoming highly
commercial and a widely accepted medium for all sort of customer relations such as
advertising, brand building, and online sales and services.
Its original spirit of
co-operation and freedom have, to a great extent, survived this explosive transformation
with the result that the vast majority of information available on the Internet is free of
charge.
URL
(Universal Resource Locator, previously "Universal")
A standard way of specifying the location of an
object, typically a web page, on the Internet.
Other types of object are described below.
URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide Web.
They are used in HTML
documents to specify the target of a hyperlink which is often another HTML document (possibly stored on
another computer).
Here are some example URLs:
- http://www.w3.org/default.html
- http://www.acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif
- http://www.foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator
HTML
A hypertext document format used on the World-Wide Web.
Hypertext
A term coined by Ted Nelson around 1965 for a collection of
documents (or "nodes") containing cross-references or "links" which, with the aid of an
interactive browser program (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera etc), allow the reader
to move easily from one document to another.
Search Engine
A remotely accessible program that lets you do keyword searches
for information on the Internet.
There are several types of search engine; the search
may cover titles of documents, URLs, headers, or the full text.
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icon next to it, it can be clicked to expand and contract.
