| Number 12 |
September 20, 1999 |
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NOTE: Links and Web sites change frequently. All links and web sites were accurate at the time of publication. |
Searching the Vastness of the Internet If the title makes searching the Internet sound like a formidable task, it should. The World Wide Web is an incredibly vast (nearly 1 billion pages by some estimates) resource. A few short years ago, one search engine, HotBot, had managed to actually catalog over a third of the pages out there. As the competition amongst search engines has increased, their cataloged range has decreased and decreased dramatically. To add to the difficulty, many of the search engines now seem more concerned with becoming your portal or start page than with actually getting web sites cataloged and organized for easy and useful searching. A recent study by two researchers at the NEC Research Institute, Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, shows that the search engine with the biggest coverage of pages, NorthernLight, only covers 16% of the web while HotBot has fallen to fourth place in coverage with 11.3% of pages indexed. The top 11 engines, in order of coverage are: 1) NorthernLight, 2) Snap, 3) AltaVista, 4) HotBot, 5) Microsoft, 6)InfoSeek, 7) Google, 8) Yahoo, 9) Excite, 10) Lycos, and 11) EuroSeek. But what do the numbers really mean? Do we want a search engine that indexes the whole World Wide Web (or WWWW)? Do we want Suzy's picture of her pet dog to be indexed alongside the holdings of the Smithsonian Institute? Should the (in)famous girls dorm room in Florida web site be indexed along with other famous places like Cape Canaveral? It would be wonderful to just have the useful site indexed but who decides what's useful and what's not? No matter how sophisticated the algorithms for ranking and indexing sites, the most important aspect of a search engine is its user-friendliness. For that, HotBot continues to top our list of search engines. If you want to customize your search, the tools for doing so are right there in the left margin. You don't have to click any buttons to go to an "Advanced" search which sounds to sophisticated for us common folk. Two other favorites are NorthernLight with its custom search folders and Google with its "I'm feeling lucky" button that takes you directly to the number one ranked site for your search. If we add the human element back into the equation (along with spiders and complex mathematical formulas) we end up with endeavors such as the Mining Co. / About collection of web sites put together as guides created by people who are specialists in their fields and collect and update information about their specialty. Our conclusion? It might be best NOT to have a search engine that indexes the whole web. After all how many English speakers want to read a computer support page in Japanese? Or run a search for taxes and end up at a pornography website (as happened at Educyber in March). It's also important for each of us to remember that the search engine we're using at the moment is just a small snapshot of pages available on the web. |
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| Edunotes
Newsletter This newsletter is created by Brian and Maki DeLaet and Nick Lee at Educyber, Inc. Subscriptions in the U.S. are free. Subscribe online at www.educyber.com or call (303) 268-2245. Educyber is based at: 4251 Kipling St. #190. Wheat Ridge, CO 80033 |
Edu
Words (a glossary for computer users) Removable Media: Any disk used to store information that can also be easily removed from the disk drive. Floppy Disk: The venerable 3 ¼" removable media that has been the standard in computing for a few years. It stores up to 1.4 Megabytes of data. The floppy is rapidly giving way to disks of greater storage capacity. Zip Disk: This removable media ushered in a new age of removable media with its 100 Megabyte storage capacity. The zip disk is only slightly larger than a floppy disk but can store as much data as 71 floppy disks! SuperDisk: This removable media is just right for those of us who aren't ready to give up floppies but are ready for something more. The disk can store 120 MB of data but the drive that reads the disk can also read your old floppy disks. |
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Ask
Ed Cyber
Q.
Ed, I just got on the Internet and love it. My problem though is
my sister also loves it. We've only got one email account. Sharing email
isn't working, especially when my girlfriend writes. What should we
do? -Lacking Privacy A.
Dear Mr. Privacy, Q.
Everytime I write a letter in Word, I get all these red and green
squiggly lines under words. A. Those lines can interrupt the creative juices while writing. Fortunately it's easy to turn that automatic checking off. Click on the Tools menu and select Options. Click on the Spelling & Grammar tab. Uncheck (by clicking on the check) the boxes marked "Check spelling as you type" and "Check grammar as you type." Or, for those readers who've got it turned off and want to turn it on, check the unchecked boxes. When a word is not in the Microsoft dictionary automatic spell checking underlines the word. You can then right click the word for possible alternatives or to tell it to ignore the word. You can even add often used words (school or company names for example) to the custom dictionary. What's in a
chip?
The chip that runs your
computer, the CPU or Central Processing Unit is the most expensive part
of your computer. Whether
you're going shopping or just want to be able to hold up your end of a
chip discussion, read on. There are many different makers
of chips but the leader of the pack is Intel.
Chances are the chip that runs your computer is made by Intel.
They make the Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium Pro, Pentium III and
Celeron chips. Their
biggest challenger is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and they are posing
quite a challenge to Intel right now which is one of the main reasons
prices have dropped so much. The new AMD chip, the Athlon is reportedly much better than a
comparable Intel chip. Other manufacturers of chips
include Cyrix and for the chips that make Macs go, there's Motorola's
PowerPC. Motorola's G4
processor is the cutting edge for Macs just as the Pentium III and
Athlon are the cutting edge for PC's.
If you want power these are the chips to get but expect to pay
more. The next thing to figure out
with a chip is this megahertz business.
Remember that one megahertz (MHz) is one million cycles per
second. While the high end
computers have already reached 600 MHz with speeds of 700 MHz promised before the end of the year,
low end computers come in around 366 MHz.
If you buy a computer with a chip slower than 366, expect to be
upgrading in another year or so. The only thing left to figure
out is what is the difference between a Pentium II or III and a Celeron.
You'll have noticed that computers that run on Celerons are
considerably cheaper than Pentiums.
And with good cause. The
Celeron has a smaller L2 cache which simply means it doesn't perform
as well as a Pentium. The Pentium processors can also run multiple processors (not
something most of us do anyway) whereas "The Intel Celeron processor
does not support dual or multiprocessing" (from Intel website). Modems, DSL and Cable
How do you access the Internet?
As with all things computer related, speed is vital and the
minimum speed that is considered acceptable is moving upward.
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The
Spider's Apprentice
http://www.monash.com/spidap.html Going back to basics. This
is a site that can help you find the information on the Internet. No, it
is not a search engine. It is a site that helps you to learn more about
search engines and how they work, so that you can use such media more
effectively. The
Good, Clean Funnies List "GCFL is a list for
distributing jokes and funnies that are good, clean and (hopefully)
funny. An effort is made to send one funny per working day selected from
other joke sources. The purpose of this list is to send a good, clean
joke out so that everyone can get a laugh in the morning before or at
the start of their day." Map
Quest
This is one of the sites I
visit quite frequently. You can get door-to-door driving directions on
how to get to places. You simply type in your starting address and
destination and press "Calculate Directions". You can print
out the map and take it with you when you leave so you won't be driving
around and around forever. No Such Thing as a Free computer A free computer!!
That's right, you can have the computer free if you agree to a
three year Internet contract. Since you're planning to be on the net anyway, why not get
a computer for free? Simple,
right? The following are new Windows
messages that are under consideration for the planned Windows 2000:
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This Newsletter is published by Educyber. For more information, or to subscribe, call (303) 268-2245 or Email edunotes@educyber.com ©1999 Educyber,Inc.