The internet has to be one of the greatest inventions of the last millennium. It has certainly revolutionised the way we communicate, listen to music, watch movies, and even control home electronics. The World Wide Web offers us endless possibilities. How this piece of technology works is indeed fascinating. Its origin is also interesting
The origin
The internet has its roots in the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency) project of the 1960s. J.C.R. Licklider of ARPANET is credited to be the brain behind the idea of a computer network. His theory that computers should be designed and used in accordance with how human beings work, was difficult to understand at the beginning. His vision was finally in 1969 when the ARPANET transmitted data across its network. The growth of networks was given a significant boost in 1972 with the arrival of electronic mail or email
In 1989, Tim Berners Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed a new system for information distribution, which became the World Wide Web or simply the Web. It was based on hypertext – a system of embedding links in text pointing to text either on the same page or a different one
Internet basics
The internet is a worldwide network of interconnected computers. Each of these machines has a unique address (IP address). The individual computers are actually part of smaller networks. These computers on different networks speak to each other in a standard ********; the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) protocol. So the PCs at your college are part of the college LAN (local area network) and you need an ISP (internet service provider) to connect to the internet. This ISP in turn may be part of another large network
Surfing the net
The information on the internet is stored on specialised computers called servers. These computers have bigger memories and faster processing speeds. The end users, access these servers using software known as browsers. The Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are the two most popular browsers used today
So, for example, when you put in a web address such as www.gulfnews.com in your browser address bar, the browser first contacts a special server (called domain name system or DNS server) which gives the browser the IP address of the server storing information about this website, which is 67.192.115.130 in this particular case. Just as for human beings it’s easy to remember names, for machines it’s the numbers
The web browser then contacts this server for information using the IP address. The connection between the two closes as soon as all the information (text, pictures, etc) related to the page is loaded onto the browser screen. A ‘Done’ is then displayed on the bottom left of your browser screen
Search engines – life made easy
The popularity of Google has shown how important search engines have become. Broadly speaking, a search engine relies on either or both of these methods: Automated programmes called ‘spiders’
Human submission of information
Spiders periodically build and update a database by going through the content and the background HTML (******** used to display documents on the web) of the different websites. The information stored includes the word, link to the page containing it, and most importantly the relevance of this word
The relevance in turn depends on several factors such as, the number of times it appears on the page, sub-heads and links. This database is then indexed
When we search for a term, say for e.g., ‘Dubai’, the spider looks out for the word in the index created. It then displays the results with the associated links extracted from the internal database. Different search engines employ different algorithms to search, and that’s why their results vary
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