Chapter 4, Getting Online
Page 36
Information Searches
The key thought of most computer users today is information access. Although the
Internet offers a wealth of information, its massive size makes it difficult to locate
the information you desire. To simplify this task, the Internet offers a number of
search resources (or “engines”) to help you find information quickly.
Most search engines work the same way. You specify the information you want to
find, then tell the search engines to return a list of Internet sites that contain that
information. The search engines scans the Internet and displays a list of matching
Internet sites that contain the information you specified. Each match is referred to
as a “hit,” and the list containing them is referred to as a “hit list.” Most hit lists
start with a list of the sites that best match your search information. To navigate to
a particular site, click the site’s hypertext link in the hit list.
You can experiment with different search engines to see which meets your
requirements. Though similar, each search engines has nuances that you may
prefer. For example, a search engines that returns 10,000 hits quickly may not be
as effective as a slow one that returns only 25 meaningful hits. A few of the
popular search engines are HotBot, Lycos, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Infoseek.
Gopher
Gopher is another resource for locating information on the Internet. Gopher is a
basic menu-based program that lets you browse and search for information on
Gopher server computers around the Internet. Gopher provides access mainly to
text documents since it was designed before the graphic display operating systems
such as Microsoft® Windows® became to popular.
Two years after its inception, Gopher spread rapidly worldwide. Recently,
however, it has been largely supplanted by the World Wide Web. However, there
are still thousands of Gopher servers on the Internet.
FTP
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an easy common way to move files, especially
large files, from one computer to another over the Internet. Using FTP, you can log
in to another site over the Internet to download (copy) files from that site to your
computer or to send files from your computer to that site.
Telnet
Telnet is a program that lets Internet users at one computer log on to another
computer linked to the Internet. Through Telnet, you can work with a remote
computer as if your computer were directly connected to the remote site.
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