Browsing Web Pages
You may already be quite comfortable with browsing the Internet, but you may not have pondered how browsers move around the Web and retrieve data. Any element of a web page (text, graphic, audio, or video) can be linked to another page using a hyperlink. A hyperlink describes a destination within a web document and can be inserted in text or a graphical object, such as a company logo. Text that is linked is called hypertext.
A website is a series of related web pages that are linked together. You get to a website by entering the URL, such as in your browser. Every website has a starting page, called the home page, which is displayed when you enter the site URL. You can also enter a URL to jump to a specific page on a site.
Searching Online Content
A search engine, such as Google.com, Ask.com, and Yahoo.com, catalogs and indexes web pages for you. A type of search engine called a search directory can also catalog pages into topics such as finance, health, news, shopping, and so on. Search engines may seem to be free services, but in reality they are typically financed by selling advertising. Some also make money by selling information about your online activities and interests to advertisers.
The newest wave of search engines, including Microsoft Bing and Google Squared, not only search for content but also make choices among content to deliver more targeted results. Such search engines allow you, for example, to ask for a list of female tennis stars from 1900 on, and they then assemble a table of them for you.
So how do search engines work? You can search for information by going to the search engine’s website and typing your search text, which can include one or more keywords or keyword phrases. For example, to find information about the international space station you could type space station in the search engine’s search text box and press the Enter key. You can narrow your search by specifying that you want to view links to certain types of results such as images, maps, or videos.
You can get more targeted search results by honing your searching technique. Effective searching is a skill that you gain through practice. For example, typing space station in a search engine’s web page could easily return more than eighty million results. If what you really need is the cost to build the station, consider a more targeted keyword phrase like space station cost. Search engines provide advanced search options, which you can use to include or exclude certain results. For example, you can exclude pages with certain domain suffixes (such as .com and .net) to limit your search results to educational and government sites.
A metasearch engine, such as dogpile.com, searches keywords across several websites at the same time. For example, imagine you need to fly from Atlanta to Seattle. Instead of checking available flights on three different airline websites, you can use a metasearch engine to check all of the airline sites at once.
Evaluating Web Content
Though a wealth of accurate and useful information exists online, some people believe that if they read it in the newspaper or online, it must be true. That, however, is not the case. As in the offline world, you have to consider the source of online content. If you trust technology information from Wired magazine in print, you can have a similar level of trust in their online site. If you do not know a source at all, you may have to do some digging to discover if it is reputable by looking at the source’s credentials (what individuals or organizations are involved in the venture), methods (for example, is the information based on surveys and experiment, or personal opinion?), and reputation (what do other online users say in reviews of the site or the company’s products?).
Because anyone can publish to the Web, to gauge the accuracy of what you read, you have to verify the three Ws (or WWW) of online content.
- WHO is the author or publisher? Is the source credible?
- WHAT is the message? Is the information verifiable? Is there a possibility of bias? Always try to crosscheck the information with other sources. Look for sponsors of a site to determine if they have a bias.
- WHEN was this published? Is this information current? If no date is published, is it possible to figure out how current the information is from the text? Online information can stay put for a very long time. Always look for the most current information on any topic.
Intellectual Property
Some information or works are placed online to be shared and passed on. Other content falls into the category of intellectual property, much of which is copyrighted. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), intellectual property refers to “the creations of the mind; inventions, literary and artistic works; and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.” Copying or distributing intellectual property without appropriate permission is illegal.
The Internet has brought the issue of illegal treatment of intellectual property front and center. Because copying and pasting content online is so simple, many people who would never dream of stealing a CD from a music store or a book from a bookstore download music illegally or plagiarize by using text or images from a website and representing that content as their own work.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs such as BearShare are used by millions of people to share music, video, and other types of files by downloading them from others’ hard drives, rather than from the Internet. This type of sharing is ripe for copyright abuse because materials that might be downloaded from a legitimate source by paying a fee are instead exchanged freely with no payment going to the copyright owner.
However, some people feel that copyright law in the digital age has gone too far. There’s a strong sense among many Internet activists that laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act distort the balance between fair use (the right to reuse content that is available to all) and intellectual property rights and are a threat to creativity and technological innovation.