Tutorial: Internet Primer

Key Topics

The Internet and the World Wide Web

The Internet is a worldwide system of computer networks in which users at any one computer can extract information from any other computer. It is a public, cooperative, and self-sustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The World Wide Web (also referred to as WWW or the Web) is an Internet facility that links documents locally and remotely. The Web document, or Web page, contains text, graphics, animations, and videos, as well as hypertext links. The links in the page let users jump from page to page (hypertext), whether the pages are stored on the same server or on servers around the world. Web pages are accessed and read via a Web browser, the two most popular being Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Although there are other facilities on the Internet (e.g., file transfer protocol, newsgroups, chat rooms), generally speaking, when people refer to the Internet, they are referring to the WWW.

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Common Terms

The following are some common Internet terms you should know.

The following explains the parts of the URL using the DON Information Management/Information Technology Web site as an example:

http://www.doncio.navy.mil

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Search Tools

There are several types of search tools that can be used to search the Internet. These tools are used to find information on the Internet when you don’t know the URL. There are currently more than 16,000 search engines and/or directories. The following Web sites maintain lists of search engines and directories:

Search Engines

Search engines search the Web based on criteria you enter. Typically, a search engine works by sending out a “spider” to fetch as many documents as possible. A spider is a program that automatically fetches Web pages and feeds them to the search engine. It’s called a spider because it “crawls” over the Web. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query. Some of the more popular search engines are:

Meta Search Engines

Meta search engines use a single interface to provide simultaneous searching of the most popular search engines. Some popular metasearch engines are:

Directories

A directory is a search site that catalogs Web sites by subject and also manually indexes the site, providing a brief description of its content. Popular directory sites are:

Virtual Libraries

Virtual libraries are directories that librarians or cybrarians have organized in a logical way. Some virtual library sites are:

For more information on Searching, go to Searching Resources for broad based search information, or for more topic specific searching.

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Internet Bulletin Boards

“Internet bulletin boards” is a collective term for an Internet service that permits one person to post a message and for others to read and comment (post a reply). Uses include:

Two popular bulletin board systems on the Internet are:

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