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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
Internet Addresses
Most Internet address look like the following example and we can tell something about the website
we are visiting from it’s address.
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.
This identifies the
organisation or individual
that the website belongs to
http://www.northern.ac.uk
www. stands for
World Wide Web
This is an example of a
domain and ‘ac’ stands
for academic in the UK
This part of the
address relates to
the country which
hosts the website –
the UK
.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/
ICT Key Skills
Search Engines
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.com
www.metacrawler.com
www.mamma.com
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:
•
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?