What is HTML? HyperText Markup Language: HTML is a plain text file
with commands markup tags to tell the Web browsers how to display
the file. Tim Berners-Lee created HTML while at CERN, (the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva.
There is a course here at this location on the
basics of HTML.
Most
people are on an ISP (Internet Service Provider) package which
limits either:
The megabyte down loads per month;
The hours of usage; or
Both
What does download
mean? Downloading
is an action. It is the transfering information from a computer on
the Internet to your computer. Some examples of downloads are:
Emails
Web pages
MP3s or songs
Pictures
Games
Programs/ Software
'Browsing' or
'surfing' the Internet is a type of download. Each page you view
has to be downloaded to your PC from the Internet.
When you
enter a page into the address bar on your browser it is downloaded
to your computer. The amount of data that is transferred to your
computer depends on what is contained within the webpage. Your ISP
will usually charge you based upon either the amount of data you
download or the amount of time it takes to download it.
As
a result of this you need to think about economy of usage. For
example, pick your search engines of choice and add them to your
list of favorites/bookmarks on your web browser
Say I want
to use Google™ Advanced, instead Google™, then I wish to go there
in one step and not have to go through the front screen to get to
the Advanced Search Engine screen.
To achieve this I simply
add the Advanced Engine screen to my Favorites by calling up the
page then activating the Favorites menu and choosing "Add to
Favorites" (Internet Explorer only, for Netscape 4.7 use
Communicator -> Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark. For Netscape 6
use Bookmarks -> Add Current Page). This results in less
clicking, less to download and less time
Know thy Browser.
The help
button on web browsers generally tell you all you need to know to
fix any little problems.
Google™ and
other search engines default to Boolean Searching
What is
Boolean???? Internet
search engines are a computer database that contain information
about pages on the Internet. As such, they must be used according
to the rules of computer database searching. Genrally database
searches allow the use of Boolean logic. Boolean logic refers to
the logical relationship among search terms, and is named for the
British mathematician George Boole.
The Boolean logic used
in search engines generally consists of these three "logical
operators"
OR
AND
NOT
Search for dog AND
cat Search for dog OR
cat Search for dog NOT
cat
SEARCH
TIPS
There is a plethora of search engines on the Internet.
Besides the major ones. (
Altavista™, Google™, Yahoo™, Excite™). There are also
specialty search engines which focus in certain areas. News
groups, shopping, travel, medical, and so forth.
There are
also search engines that are attached to individual sites, just
like the one here at the ABC.
These engines are designed to
look ONLY within the host web site. (I have even found a web
site devoted to search engines on the Internet. And it has a
search engine to search for search engines.!!!! Go figure
that??)
Most search engines at web sites look like this. A
simple box.
SEARCH
The trick is now to use it in such a way that you
will find what you are looking for.
If you wanted to search the ABC for the weather forecast
for tomorrow in Sydney. You could key in
SEARCH
But the search may
find hundreds of pages and it becomes guesswork to which one is
the one in particular that you are looking for.
So we can
enter more information to help find the page we are looking
for. The main words are Sydney weather forecast SEARCH
This
should narrow it down.
Now when you hit the search button what
happens behind the scenes??. (This is all figuratively speaking
to get across the concept. It does happen in a different manner.
But this will give you the gist.)
Picture a web site like a
giant filing cabinet with all the information placed in its proper
folder. The search engine opens up every file (in a matter of
seconds) and extracts all the files that have the words Sydney
OR Weather OR Forecast
The word may only appear once
but the search engine will extract it anyway. The search engine
then sorts the files that it has extracted, looking for all the
files that have all three words together on the one page.
Then it finds the pages with two of the three words. Then
one of the words.
The search engine then makes a list of
all the files that have all the three key words together. The
files with only two of the key words will be listed second and the
files with only one word will be listed last. Some search engines
will only show the list of files with all three keywords.
This makes a list with priority given to the files most
likely to be the one that we were looking for.
Now let's say we
wanted to find details of a story stating that chickens have been
used in breast cancer research.
If you search for
SEARCH You never
know what you will end up with, Maybe recipes of Chicken
Breasts with Rosemary???? Once again our principle nouns are
Chickens Breast & Cancer SEARCH
Now just say for
instance we kept getting all these files about chickens with
cancer in the breast meat and not the research item we were after.
We could take a stab at what the article would be
saying. "Researchers have found…" "Experiments have
revealed…"
So let us add a few more words to narrow down
the search even further. SEARCH This has
hopefully shortened the list of files so helping us find what we
were looking for.
Now we want to search Rugby Union but NOT the Citibank
cup.
If you search for SEARCH Then you might end up with all
the Citibank cup stories.
So we need to search for files on
Rugby Union that exclude the Citibank cup We do this by using a
minus sign. Like this SEARCH
The search will
extract all the files on rugby union but put back all the files
with the word Citibank on them.
Now, continuing the example, we want to search Rugby Union
but NOT the Citibank cup. We use the minus sign SEARCH
But
we keep getting stories about Rugby league and a union dispute of
referees. That is because the files have both the words "Rugby"
and "Union" We need to tell the search engine to look for ONLY
"Rugby Union"
We do this by placing the words rugby union
in quotation marks. SEARCH
This way the
search engine will only pick out the files that have the word
rugby and the word union together as an EXACT PHRASE instead of
anywhere in the document.
The search engine shall now
find all the files with "Rugby Union" together and remove all the
ones with Citibank.
