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© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy
The World Wide Web (WWW) is like a huge library. It is full of billions of documents (books, pages, pictures, sounds and movies). Let's say that you want to read Jim's article entitled, Quadratic Formula. Well it is at your fingertips, or is it? This library happens to be in a state of disarray, and it contains a lot of useless garbage, and it is getting worse as it expands. Unless you already know where the document is, you will never find it without help from search engines (sort of like helpful librarians), and directories (sort of like card catalogs).
You view the documents with a browser, like Netscape or Internet Explorer. These are programs that dial up the WWW and display the documents. They also have some search features. Well, let's say that you already know where Jim's document is. It is at http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/quad.html. That monstrosity (called a URL for Universal Resource Locator) is like the Library of Congress call letters for the document. I called it a monstrosity, but it is a little more informative than call letters. Anyway, you can type that into your browser, and the document will appear on your computer screen. Maybe you want to read it later, and don't want to type the URL again; you can place a bookmark. Then next time, you can just click on the bookmark, and my document will again appear on your screen.
Chances are, you don't already know that my quadratic formula page exists. You want to learn about the quadratic formula, as several students have, and you search the WWW. One way is to go to a directory like Yahoo. As I said above, a directory is like a card catalog. Yahoo is also a search engine, but I'll deal with that later. Yahoo has a URL (http://www.yahoo.com), but your browser probably already has a bookmark for going right to Yahoo. Also, you can probably just abbreviate the URL to "yahoo.com," and still get there. I go to Yahoo, and I see a list of topics, but don't see "mathematics." I click on "science," which seemed like the best fit. Ah, there is "mathematics;" I click on that. Then I click on "algebra." And here I see a list of documents: "Algebra Homework Help Center," or "Algebra-Help," or "Algebra Online," or "Purplemath - Your Algebra Resource." There are other less appropriate documents, about linear algebra and geometry, but the ones I listed above look promising. I can click on one of these documents, and maybe find all I need about the quadratic formula.
But if I'm smart, I will use a search engine. A search engine does a more specific search. If I'm just looking for "algebra," then the directory may be more useful. If I use the search engine to find documents about algebra, I will wind up with millions of documents. I choose my favorite search engine, which is called Google (http://www.google.com/). At Google, I type in "quadratic formula," and wait a few seconds while Google searches the WWW for documents about that subject. I prefer Google, because it lists the documents with the most popular documents first. I type "quadratic formula," and wait one second, and Google tells me that it has found about 29,300 documents. The first one (most popular) is http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/quad.html, which is my page. Shucks. Some students have done similar searches, and then thanked me for writing that document.
Also see What Is The World Wide Web? for a little more info.