There are millions of WebPages that come from all over the world, yet how will you know what the address of a page you want is?
Search engines save the day. A search engine is a very large website that allows you to search it's own database of websites. For instance, if you wanted to find a website on dogs, you'd search for "dog" or "dogs" or "dog information." Here are a few search-engines.
1. Altavista (
http://www.altavista.digital.com) - Web spider & Indexed
2. Yahoo (
http://www.yahoo.com) - Web spider & Indexed Collection
3. Excite (
http://www.excite.com) - Web spider & Indexed
4. Lycos (
http://www.lycos.com) - Web spider & Indexed
5. Metasearch (
http://www.metasearch.com) - Multiple search
A web spider is a program used by search engines that goes from page to page, following any link it can possibly find. This means that a search engine can literally map out as much of the Internet as it's own time and speed allows for.
An indexed collection uses hand-added links. For instance, on Yahoo's site. You can click on Computers & the Internet. Then you can click on Hardware. Then you can click on Modems, etc., and along the way through sections, there are sites available which relate to what section you're in.
Metasearch searches many search engines at the same time, finding the top choices from about 10 search engines, making searching a lot more effective.
Once you are able to use search engines, you can effectively find the pages you want.
With the arrival of networking and multi user systems, security has always been on the mind of system developers and system operators. Since the dawn of AT&T and its phone network, hackers have been known by many, hackers who find ways all the time of breaking into systems. It used to not be that big of a problem, since networking was limited to big corporate companies or government computers who could afford the necessary computer security.
The biggest problem now-a-days is personal information. Why should you be careful while making purchases via a website? Let's look at how the internet works, quickly.
The user is transferring credit card information to a webpage. Looks safe, right? Not necessarily. As the user submits the information, it is being streamed through a series of computers that make up the Internet backbone. The information is in little chunks, in packages called packets. Here's the problem: While the information is being transferred through this big backbone, what is preventing a "hacker" from intercepting this data stream at one of the backbone points?
Big-brother is not watching you if you access a web site, but users should be aware of potential threats while transmitting private information. There are methods of enforcing security, like password protection, an most importantly, encryption.
Encryption means scrambling data into a code that can only be unscrambled on the "other end." Browser's like Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer feature encryption support for making on-line transfers. Some encryptions work better than others. The most advanced encryption system is called DES (Data Encryption Standard), and it was adopted by the US Defense Department because it was deemed so difficult to 'crack' that they considered it a security risk if it would fall into another countries hands.
A DES uses a single key of information to unlock an entire document. The problem is, there are 75 trillion possible keys to use, so it is a highly difficult system to break. One document was cracked and decoded, but it was a combined effort of 14,000 computers networked over the Internet that took a while to do it, so most hackers don't have that many resources available.