17 Internet and Internet Tools

Dr. Reni Francis

Unit Structure:

16.1 Introduction

16.2 What is the Internet?

16.3 Internet and its History

16.4 How does the Internet Work?

16.5 Major Internet Tools and Services

16.6 Web Browsers

16.7 Using the Web Browser

16.8 Using the Search Tool

16.9 Citing Online Resources

16.10 Citing Online Resources

16.0 learning Outcomes:

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:

To have an understanding of Internet.
To be aware of the history of Internet.
To be able to understand the working of the Internet.
To be aware of the major Internet Tools and services.
To have an understanding of Web browsers.
To be able to comprehend the using of web browsers.
To be able to comprehend the using of search tools.
To be aware of the various means of citing online resources.

16.1 Introduction:

Internet has emerged of prime importance in today’s drastic shift from print to digital information and it has become the primary source of information, knowledge sharing, social networking etc which requires people to gain and equip themselves with new skills and knowledge in using the Internet for their easy and wide use. The Internet connects the corners of the cobwebbed world from the remotest corner to the busiest city.

16.2 What is Internet?

The Internet is a worldwide network of computers making use of a group of protocols called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) that supports interconnection of a number of different computer networks. The Internet can be defined as the wired or wireless mode of communication through which one can receive, transmit information that can be used for single or multiple operations.

The Internet in simple terms is a network of the interlinked computer networking worldwide, which is accessible to the general public. These interconnected computers work by transmitting data through a special type of packet switching which is known as the IP or the Internet protocol.

Uses of Internet:

Internet is a very good medium to connect with the outer world. People use it as a medium to connect with other people sharing files, entertainment and lots of other activities that are useful and beneficial in many ways. The few dominant reasons why people use the Internet are given below:

Information: People browse Internet for information. They love to browse various search engines like Google, Yahoo to know about any necessary news. Also they love to browse websites like Wikipedia which is a full fledged encyclopedia on Internet.

Social Networking: Social networking is a good medium to communicate with friends and family members. There are many social networking sites like Face book, Twitter etc which are used by people in connecting with friends.

Communication: Communication is another way to use the Internet. People connect with others through various IM services like GTalk, Skype and Yahoo messenger. There are lots of other services through which people send messages.

Transfer of Files: People – school students, college students, office staff, businesspeople, everyone sends files through the Internet. This is an essential part of their lives. These files are sent through the Internet. People use various mail services like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail etc to send files.

Current News: It is either latest news, or Sport updates; people love to surf Internet to get live update of any news. Websites like Rediff, NY times are quick news providing websites.

Entertainment: Internet and Entertainment are closely related. It could be in the form of watching videos in YouTube, plying live games, or downloading movies, Internet provides its entertainment dominance everywhere.

Internet transactions: Now Internet can save time and money of the people. The facility is known as Internet banking facility through which people can deposit any bill, transfer money through account, and also make Internet reservation on time from their home.

Marketing: Internet marketers make extensive use of Internet to sell products. There are lots of social media enthusiasts who promote others’ products online via various social media sites.

Online Education: This has developed very fast in most countries. Various websites offer online courses to learn various things like designing, programs or subjects. Online education is very helpful to promote education in places where the courses are not available easily. It also helps in spaced and paced learning.

16.3 Internet and its History:

In its infancy stage the Internet was originally conceived by the Department of Defense as a way to protect government communication systems in the event of military strike. The original network dubbed ARPANet (for the Advanced Research Projects Agency that developed it) evolved in to a communication channel among contractors, military personnel and university researchers who were contributing to ARPA projects.

The network employed a set of standard protocols to create an effective way for these people to communicate and share data with each other. ARPAnet’s popularity continued to spread among researchers and in 1980 the National Science Foundation linked several high speed computers and took charge of what came known to be as the Internet. By the late 1980’s thousands of cooperating networks were participating in the Internet. The NREN (National Research Education Network) took up the initiative to develop and maintain high speed networks for research and education and to investigate the commercial uses of the Internet.

16.4 How does the Internet work?

The Internet is a global collection of networks that links business, offices, educational institutions, and people. Data is transferred from computers that have Internet connectivity that provide centralized storage areas to computers that can access the contents of the storage areas. The data passes through the various communication lines. Each computer or device on a communications line has a numeric address called an IP (Internet Protocol) address and the text version of which is called a domain name. Every time you specify a domain name, a DNS (domain name system) server translates the domain name into its associated IP address, so that data is routed to the correct computer.

Internet can be accessed through an Internet service provider which could be an online service provider, or a wireless service provider. An Internet service provider (ISP) provides temporary Internet connections to individuals and offices. An online service provider (OSP) also supplies Internet access. It also provides variety of special content and services. A wireless service provider (WSP) provides wireless Internet access to users with wireless modems.

When we want to access a website that is available on a server in some place in the world, then we can connect using the Internet access provider and type the website, the request will travel through the different computers in the network till it reaches the server you wish to access.

The following picture gives a glimpse of the Internet with several home computers connected to a server:

16.5 Major Internet tools and services

Internet is a worldwide collection of networks. The Internet has different tools and services that are provided:

E-mail
Voice mail
FTP
WWW
E-Commerce
Chat
Search Engine
Electronic mail (email): E-mail is an electronic mail. The messages can be sent electronically over a network. For sending or receiving an email, the user must have an email address; email address is given as:

username@location

Username: It is the recipient’s email name.
@: It is a character, which is used to separate the email name an location.
Location: It is a place – the electronic post office, where the recipient’s mail is delivered and stored.
Voice mail: Initially only text mails were being sent. If the voice information is to be sent or received, then the user has to send it as an attachment file. But nowadays, the new technology allows us to send and receive the voice data directly through the Internet as a voicemail. The only requirement is that computer should have a multimedia facility and voice mail software.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol): It is a fast application level TCP/IP protocol widely used for transferring both text- based and binary files to and from remote systems through the Internet. Most of the people use FTP program for downloading the software on the Internet.
World Wide Web (WWW): In the Internet, different types of computer are connected to each other. These computers may have different operating systems. When the data is to be transformed from one computer to other computer and if the operating systems of both computers are different, then both operating systems should understand the data format which is to be transferred. The www provides an interactive document and the software to access the data on any computer.
E-Commerce: Web technologies play a very important role in business. Websites are created to perform the business. Online trading is now a very important feature of the Internet. It is also called as e-commerce. So the geographical boundaries have become faint due to Internet and e-commerce.
Chat: It is an Internet application. Using the program, the user needs to get connected in a chat. The user has to log in the chat- room, get access in a particular chat room, find other users connected in a chat room and start chatting with the users connected in that room.
Search Engine: It is used to search the required information over the Internet. This is possible by getting the home pages or websites dedicated to the particular subject. There are different types of search engines on the type of search criteria for indexing pages and returning results. Size of the index, review of web pages, links with priorities, net tags, importace of pages are the categories for getting the different search approaches of the search engines.

16.6 Web Browsers

A browser is a piece of software that acts as an interface between the user and the inner-working of the Internet. The browser contacts a web server and sends request for information, receives the information and then displays it on the user’s computer. There are different types of browsers and all of them perform the same basic function but many have specific features that are unique, e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla etc.

16.7 Using the Web Browser

Internet surfing or ‘net surfing’ is the process of visiting different websites on the Internet hosted by various companies, organizations, educational institutions, magazines, individuals and others.

Snapshot of using the Browser:

16.8 Using the search tool

The search tool helps in finding the information by contacting the server and sending a copy of the requested item, closes the connection and waits for the next connection. The use of search tool can be seen below:

First you will need to open Internet Explorer, then enter www.google.com in the address bar.

Here is what www.google.com looks like:

To conduct the search, point and click your mouse in the search textbox. Type in the textbox the words or words you would like to search. Then point and click your mouse on the Google Search button below the search textbox.

As an example, the word ‘flowers’ was entered into the Google textbox and after clicking on the

Google Search button these are the results:

Every phrase in either blue with an underline may be clicked on to visit that particular site. These are hyperlinks to websites. The websites deemed most fitting for the search are found at the near the top of the list. There are also paid sponsors found at the top (shaded) and to the right of the screen that you may visit if you wish. You can see actual web addresses in green text.

In addition, notice the results area:

These results are found on the top right of the page. 233,000,000 would be impossible to go through therefore you will need to learn ways to reduce the amount of results. To continue reviewing the search results pages, scroll to the bottom of the Google webpage until you see:

Click on the number 2 or on the blue arrow to the right to continue through the search results

Go To Google : You can go directly to Google.com by typing in http://google.com into your web browser. That will take you to the main Google web site.

Preview Your Answer: As you review results, you’ll wonder if some of the listed sites are the best answer to what you’re looking for. Google provides a way to quickly check on this. It’s called Google Instant Previews. Next to the web page listings, you’ll see a magnifying glass symbol appear:

Refine Your Google Search: Google doesn’t know what exactly you want when you enter a search, so the results you get are the best guess. There are ways you can help it make better. For one, Google provides a variety of ways to refine your searches, to narrow them down. You can get back just video answers, restrict results by date, explore answers by browsing through a “Wonder Wheel” of suggestions or simple review some of the related searches it may list among your results, like these examples from a search for DVD players:

There are also special commands that you can use when entering your search words. For example, if you put quotes around search words like this: “how to search in Google’, then your results will only show pages that are deemed to have those exact words on them, in that exact order — or be relevant to those exact words in other ways.

16.9 Citing Online Resources

Citing of resources is very important process in writing a research paper. This enables the readers of the articles to know the resources that you have checked while preparing the research article. When one cities the resources, it provides an open platform for others to check the accuracy of the content that has been mentioned in the article. It also helps other to read through the article to arrive at the rationale behind writing the research paper.

There are several guidelines and styles for citing works correctly. There is no single uniform style that can be adopted or is appropriate in every case. The same situation exists for citing works that appear in print; you may be expected to follow APA or MLA style.

There is difference in citing resources taken from the web, books, articles, journals etc. There is no common agreement of all the details of a citation for information found on the Internet. The general form of a citation includes the name of the author, the title of the work, the date the information was last revised, the date the information was accessed, and the URL. The date the information was accessed is included because it is relatively easy to modify information on the Web, and the information available through a URL sometime in the future may not be the same as when it was accessed for the research.

Internet information resources citation and style manuals:

APA (American Psychological Association) format -based on APA’sPublication Manual Fifth Edition: APA Electronic Reference http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html
MLA Style Guides: Modern Language Association’s style guides.
http://www.mla.org/style Library of Congress: How to Cite Electronic Resources
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/start/cite/in dex.html
Chicago Manual of Style -based on The Chicago Manual of Style 14thedition -Citation Style Guides for Internet and Electronic Sources http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/citatio n/index.cfm#Chicago 16.10 Let us sum up
The Internet is a network of the interlinked computer networking worldwide, which is accessible to the general public.
Internet is a good medium to connect with the outer world. People use it as a medium to connect with other people, sharing files, entertainment and lots of other activities that are useful and beneficial in many ways.
Internet was originally conceived by the Department of Defense as a way to protect government communication systems in the event of military strike.
The Internet is a global collection of networks that links business, offices, educational institutions, and people. Data is transferred from computers that have Internet connectivity that provide centralized storage areas to computers that can access the contents of the storage areas.
Internet is a worldwide collection of networks. The Internet has different tools and services that are provided through the E-mail, Voice mail, FTP, WWW, E-Commerce, Chat, Search Engine.
The search tool helps in finding the information by contacting the server and sending a copy of the requested item, closes the connection and waits for the next connection.
Citing of resources is very important process in writing a research paper. This enables the readers of the articles to know the resources that you have checked while preparing the research article.

References:

Bare Bones Lesson 2: MetasearchEngines http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/bones/lesson2.html
MetasearchEngines http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Met aSearch.html
Chris Sherman. 2005. Metacrawlersand Metasearch Engines http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156241
Danny Sullivan. 2002. Specialty Search Engines http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156351
Bare Bones Lesson 6: Creating a Search Strategy http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/bones/lesson6.html
Recommended Search Strategy: Analyze your Topic and Search with Peripheral Vision http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Str ategies.html
BrightPlanet: Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet http://www.brightplanet.com/deepcontent/tutorials/search/in dex.asp
APA (American Psychological Association) format -based on APA’sPublication Manual Fifth Edition: APA Electronic Reference http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html
MLA Style Guides: ModernLanguage Association’s style guides. http://www.mla.org/style
Library of Congress: How to Cite Electronic Resources
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/start/cite/in dex.html