ICT Key Skills

The Internet and the World Wide Web

People often assume that the World Wide Web and the Internet are one and the same thing. They are in fact, two separate but related things.

The Internet is a network that connects millions of computers together and allows them to communicate with each other.

The World Wide Web is a means of accessing information that is available on the Internet.

We use something called a web browser to view pages via the Internet. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are two examples of web browsers. The web browser allows you to access web pages by typing in an Internet address.

ICT Key Skills

.com

.co.uk

A commercial website e.g. www.amazon.com

e.g. www.amazon.co.uk

.gov A government website e.g. www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/

.org An organisation e.g. www.greenpeace.org

.ac An academic website e.g. www.northern.ac.uk

.mil A military website e.g. http://www.defenselink.mil/

http://www.northern.ac.uk

This identifies the organisation or individual

that the website belongs to

Internet Addresses

This part of the address relates to the country which

hosts the website –the UKThis is an example of a

domain and ‘ac’ stands for academic in the UK

www. stands for World Wide Web

http stands for hyper text

transfer protocol and tells the

computer how to read the text and images that are

displayed on a web page.

Most Internet address look like the following example and we can tell something about the website we are visiting from it’s address.

ICT Key Skills

A search engine is a program that searches for information on the World Wide Web using keywords. The search engine sends out ‘crawlers’ which search through a vast number of websites looking for information which links to the keywords. The search engine then compiles a results page of websites which may be of relevance to the keyword search.

A metasearch engine is slightly different in that it searches through other search engines to compile results. It’s equivalent to using a number of search engines at once as a means of optimizing the search /results. www.google.com is an example of a metasearch engine. Other examples include:

www.dogpile.comwww.metacrawler.comwww.mamma.com

Search Engines

• What do you like about the search engine? Is it easy to use? Is the layout simple?

• What are it’s strengths/ weaknesses? Does it perform searches quickly? Is there a help facility? Can you perform different types of searches?

• How relevant is the list of results to your keyword search? Is the information you are looking for easy to find?

Have a go at using some of these search engines throughout the duration of the course. Think about which one is your favourite and why.

Use the additional notes pages to keep a record of the search engines you use and some ideas around: