Discovering the Internet

What is the Internet?
How big is the World Wide Web?
What is a search engine?
Starting Your Search: MetaSearch Engines

Some Popular Search Engines
Some Web Directories
More About the Web
Sources

What is the Internet?

According to whatis.com(a dictionary of computing and networking terms), the Internet is:

a worldwide system of computer networks - a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers).¹

^{E-mail (electronic mail)
and the World Wide Web (also called the Web) are two of the most
popular features of the Internet.}

^{Other parts of the Internet include}

Mailing lists (sometimes called Listservs) using e-mail.
Telnet or remote login. (Many library catalogs are accessible via telnet (Illinet Online, for example).
FTP or File Transfer Protocol. Allows you to send and receive files between computers.
Chat. Allows real-time communication between users. There's Yahoo Chat, for example.

How big is the World Wide Web?

According to the Chicago Tribune:²

As of mid-1999, there were approximately 800 million publicly indexable web pages (about 15 terabytes).

The web also includes approximately 180 million images.

The most comprehensive search engine, Northern Light, covers only about 16% of publicly indexable web pages. Another popular search engine, Hotbot, covers about 11%.

What is a search engine?

(This definition is a direct quote from whatis.com.)³

On the Internet, a search engine has three parts:

A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to every page or representative

pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and reads it, using hypertext links

on each page to discover and read a site's other pages.

A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") from the pages that have been read.

A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you. An alternative to using a search engine is to explore a structured directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its search engine, is the most widely-used directory on the Web. A number of Web portal sites offer both the search engine and directory approaches to finding information.

Starting Your Search: MetaSearch Engines

These sites search more than one search engine at a time.

Some Popular Search Engines

Alta Vista
Excite
Hotbot
Infoseek
Lycos
WebCrawler

Some Web Directories

Web directories provide organized, subject-oriented lists of web resources.

Yahoo!
Galaxy

Yahoo! Chicago
Digital City Chicago

More About the Web

Life on the Internet: Beginner's Guide ~ A great place to learn about the Internet.
Search Engine Reviews, Ratings, and Tests ~ Provides information about search engines.
Search Engine Watch ~ Another source of information about search engines.
Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial ~ Information on searching the web effectively.
Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Sites ~ Guidelines for determining the credibility of web sites.
Whatis.com ~ Easy-to-understand definitions of computing and networking terms.

Sources

1. "Internet." whatis.com. October 8, 1999.

2. Williams, Larry. "Net Search Engines May Need Tuneup." Chicago Tribune. July 8, 1999. Section 3. p. 3.

3. "Search Engines." whatis.com. October 5, 1999.

Web page by Anne Jordan-Baker
Assistant Librarian
A. C. Buehler Library
Elmhurst College
10/8/1999