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Internet basics


What is the Internet?

While most people use the words ‘internet’ and ‘web’ interchangeably they are really two different things. The internet is all the hardware and software that connects millions of computers to one another including private areas called intranets. The world wide web, or web is just one of the services available over this network of computers. Most of what we talk about the Internet is actually about the web.

Watch this video to learn about the history of the internet.

How does the web work?

While you don’t need to know all the technical details, understanding a little bit about how the world wide web actually works can be a big advantage. Watch this Common Craft video which explains the World Wide Web in Plain English:

The web is a collection of millions of different pages of information. These web pages are written is a special code called HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). This code has a collection of special phrases and characters that tell your web browser how the web page is supposed to look. You can see what the HTML for this page looks like by clicking on the ‘View’ menu and then selecting ‘View Source’ or ‘Page Source’ (some browsers may be different). While it can look pretty complicated, you will notice that a lot of the code is actually just simple English words that have peculiar punctuation and characters around them.

Web pages can also have other kinds of content on them including video, audio and pictures. In this case there is special code in the HTML that tells your browser where it can find the picture or video so it can then play it.

How do you find stuff on the web?

With so many web pages out there, finding what you want can be pretty difficult. In the early days of the web, there use to be massive lists of websites called directories that listed all the different sites. However as the web got bigger these lists got longer until it was hard to even find something in the directory! While there are still some directories available today like the Yahoo Directory or theODP, most people search the web using a search engine.

A search engine is a web site that finds other websites for you based on the words you enter into a text box. When you put in a search term, the search engine compares the words in the box which are called keywords to it’s database of websites. Then using a special computer program called an algorithm, it gives you a list of web sites that relate to your keywords.

Search engines use special programs called robots or spiders to find new web pages. These robots crawl around the web jumping from page to page using the links. This way the robot not only finds new web pages, but it also can figure out how important that web page is by how many other web pages are linking to it.

How do I use a search engine?

Using a search engine is an essential skill if you want to get the most out of the web. Below are some videos that will help you get started searching the web, especially Google. The best idea though is just to go to Google.com and start searching. If you use the techniques outlined below you will be searching like a pro in no time!

Watch this Common Craft video for a great introduction to using search engines.

What kind of content is there on the web?

When the web first started, there was only plain text web pages. But as internet speeds got faster, people could put more different kinds of content on the internet. Now there are pictures, videos, music and interactive applications available to access on the internet – all right from your browser!

Although the internet can be a really great place to find information and entertainment, it’s important to remember that anyone can put anything on the internet. This means that the stuff you read on the internet may not always be 100% accurate, and it’s also why there is some very offensive material on the internet. This is usually pretty easy to avoid, and some browsers even allow you to select what kind of content you want to be able to see (important if you have kids using your computer). But as long as you are aware of what’s out there, the internet is an amazing collection of the interesting, the funny, the bizarre and the entertaining!

Examples of content and services available on the internet:

Business and Money:

  • Online banking (talk to your bank about how to access your account from the internet)

  • Investing e.g. www.scottrade.com

  • Buying online, e.g. www.amazon.com (see ecommerce section)

  • Selling online e.g. www.ebay.com (see ecommerce section)

Education and Learning and Current Affairs:

Entertainment:

Communication and Socializing:

What is social bookmarking?

When you find a web page that you find interesting, instead of having to remember the address of the webpage, you can simply save the address as a ‘bookmark’ in your browser (some browsers call them favorites). Social bookmarking is like saving favorites on your browser, except you’re saving to a website that you can access from any computer in the world. But the part of social bookmarking is the ’social’ part. Everyone can look at everyone else bookmarks. This means that you can browse and search through content that other people have already decided is worth looking at.

This can be much better than a search engine, which just uses a computer program to decide what’s relevant and what’s not – with social bookmarking sites, all the content has been picked by actual people. You can also see how good different content is by how many times it’s been saved by different users. Most social bookmarking sites will display a number next to the content indicating how many times it has been saved by another user. These sites also show a continually updated list of popular web pages. This can be a great way of finding interesting content that you might not otherwise come across.

Here is a great video guide to Social Bookmarking by Common Craft:

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