Finding Information on the Web

What Is the Internet?

If you connect two or more computers together so that files can be shared between them, you have a network of computers. Connect networks together, and you have the Internet. 

The Internet is the world's largest inter-connected computer network. It consists of millions of computers, and tens of millions of users, connected together using packet switching technology (a method of sending information that doesn't require communicating computers to maintain a direct continuous link) and protocols (communication programs that are universally agreed upon) that allow those computers to talk to each other. It was established in the 1970s as ArpaNet for the express purpose of linking together the military and associated research computers. Since that time it has advanced from being primarily a research network, into a vast international research and commercial network. The Internet is the backbone and the underlying technology upon which the World Wide Web rests. The diagram below gives you an idea of the network which connects the world's computers together.

The main intercontected ovals represent the computers and networks that are connected over the Internet. There are millions of computers all talking to each other. The "Student", "Faculty" and "Joe" are all users using computers all over the campus that are connected to the campus network using the blue ethernet cables you see all over campus. Mary's computer is connected to the campus network through a dial-in connection from her home modem through the telephone lines to the campus network.

If you are really interested in a lot more details about the Internet, how it works, and how it came to be, see the Internet Society's All About the Internet for everything you ever wanted to know and more. 

The Internet and the Web

Though the terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" are often used interchangeably, they are not the same. The World Wide Web (WWW, or just Web) is just the most visible and prominent part of the Internet. The Internet itself, however, includes many other means of transferring files, sharing information, and communicating between computers. Some of the functions of the Internet include:

• World Wide Web
• Telnet - Direct ongoing connection between two computers, terminal emulation
• FTP- File Transfer Protocol
• Usenet - A collection of tens of thousands of discussion groups
• Email - Electronic mail

The confusion between the terms is understandable, however, because the Web can be used to access or perform just about any of the other Internet functions. The Web does not replace the Internet, rather it is an interface to the Internet that makes it much easier to use. Think of it like the move from DOS (a command driven interface) to Windows (a GUI, Graphical User Interface).  The Web uses hypertext technology to deliver documents, files, programs, images, and sounds to interconnected computers through the Internet. This is accomplished through the use of hypertext - a form of non-sequential text retrieval which interconnects a series of documents so that retrieval and cross referencing is possible. Users simply click on a link (hyperlink), and they are taken directly to the requested item. Hyperlinks are usually signified by underlined blue text, with purple text usually indicating links that have already been visited, though the colors can be different. Hyperlinks can also be made with graphics.

Diagram edited from  http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Talks/General.html

A wide variety of Documents/files types can be linked to on the WWW. Below is a partial list of those file types.

HTML

The Web works by means of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Protocol. HTML is a programming language to create Web pages. When you use a browser to access the Web, your browser accesses an HTML file on another computer, reads the contents of that file, and interprets from the HTML what it is supposed to display on your screen and how to display it. The HTML indicates what text goes where, the color and size of that text, where to put which images, what the background of the page looks like, etc. 

The HTML code also indicates where on a page to create a hypertext link, i.e. a spot on a page you can click on to take you either to another spot on that page, such as this link to the top of this page, or to another page, such as this link to the Wesleyan Library home page. Images can also have hypertext links embedded in them. Hypertext works by means of pointing to "addresses," or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which are built into Web pages. This hypertext linking capability is the initial creative idea behind the Web, and it is what has made the Web such a revolutionary means of publication and of using the Internet. It allows a Web page author to offer many options for further exploration. The reader is then free to select from any of those options, or, if the reader knows (or knows how to find) other URLs, even from options not offered by the author. All the rest of the stuff on the Web, e.g. images, sounds, animations, are bells and whistles added later and on top of the hypertext structure.  

If for some reason you are interested in seeing the HTML code behind a page you are viewing, select the "View" option on your browser's toolbar and click to view "Source." Or, right click on the page and select to view "Source." 

URLs

In the "Location" (Netscape) or "Address" (Internet Explorer) box of your browser (just above this window) is the URL (uniform resource locator) for this page you are now viewing:

http:// - Access method (in this case, HyperText Transfer Protocol)
www.wesleyan.edu/ - Name of server (Wesleyan [an educational (.edu) institution])
libr/tut/websearch/ - Directory and subdirectories on the server
internet.html - Requested document to be displayed by browser

This is the address in cyberspace where this web page is located. If you know the URL of a page you want to visit, type it in the Location box. In this example, the address tells your browser to use the HyperText Transfer Protocol and go to the computer named 'www.wesleyan.edu', then go to the directory 'libr', then to the folder 'tut', then the subfolder 'websearch', and retrieve the document named 'internet.html'.

You can "chop" a URL to move up "higher" in the hierarchy of directories and folders. This can be helpful if you want to find out what else is at this Web site or who is responsible for the page or site you are viewing. For example, chopping this URL to "http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/tut/" would take you to the list of all the online tutorials which Wesleyan librarians have created. Chopping it further to "http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/" would take you to the Wesleyan Library home page, where you can find out more about the institution that hosts this page. 

Next: Searching the Web     

Contents - Internet - Searching - Search Engines - Subject Directories
Invisible Web - Listservs and Newsgroups - Evaluating - Citing