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154 CHAPTER 3 The Internet and World Wide Web electronic mail (e-mail) the most-used application of the Internet. Uses a series of protocols to enable messages containing text, images, sound, and video clips to be transferred from one Internet user to another attachment a file inserted within the e-mail message WEB BROWSERS The primary purpose of Web browsers is to display Web pages, but browsers also have added features, such as e-mail and newsgroups (an online discussion group or forum). Currently 94% of Web users use either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but recently some new browsers have been developed that are beginning to attract attention. The browser Opera is becoming very popular because of its speed — it is currently the world’s fastest browser — and because it is much smaller than existing browsers (it can almost fit on a single diskette). It can also remember the last Web page you visited, so the next time you surf, you can start where you left off. And like the big two, you can get it for free; the catch is that you have to watch blinking ads in one corner, or pay $40 for the ad-free version of Opera. The browser NeoPlanet is also gaining new fans, primarily because of the 500+ skins, or design schemes, that come with it. Using skins, you can design the browser to look and sound just the way you’d like it to, rather than being limited to the standard look provided by Navigator and Internet Explorer. However, NeoPlanet requires Internet Explorer’s technology in order to operate, so you must also have IE installed on your computer. 3.5 THE INTERNET AND THE WEB: FEATURES The Internet and the Web have spawned a number of powerful new software applications upon which the foundations of e-commerce are built. E-MAIL Since its earliest days, electronic mail, or e-mail, has been the most-used application of the Internet. An estimated 3.5 billion business e-mails and 2.7 billion personal emails are sent every day in the United States (McGrane, 2001). Worldwide, more than 8 billion e-mails are sent each day. E-mail uses a series of protocols to enable messages containing text, images, sound, and video clips to be transferred from one Internet user to another. Because of its flexibility and speed, it is now the most popular form of business communication — more popular than the phone, fax, or snail mail (the U.S. Postal Service). In addition to text typed within the message, e-mail also allows attachments, which are files inserted within the e-mail message. The files can be documents, images, or sound or video clips. Although e-mail was designed to be used for interpersonal messages, it can also be a very effective marketing tool. E-commerce sites purchase e-mail lists from list providers and send mail to prospective customers, as well as existing customers. The response rate from targeted e-mail campaigns can be as high as 20%, extraordinary
when compared to banner ad response rates of less than 1%. Most e-commerce sites also have a “Contact Us” section that includes an e-mail contact, to make requests and comments easier for customers. However, in addition to this acceptable practice of communicating with people who have requested such contact, some companies also use e-mail as a mass mailing technique, also known as spam, or unsolicited e-mail. There are a number of state laws against spamming, but it is still the bane of the Web. SEARCH ENGINES T he Internet and the Web: Features 155 Search engines can be Web sites themselves, such as Google and AltaVista, or a service within a site that allows users to ask for information about various topics. A search engine identifies Web pages that appear to match keywords, also called queries, typed by the user and provides a list of the best matches. A query can be a question, a series of words, or a single word for the search engine to look for. How exactly individual search engines work is a proprietary secret, and at times defies explanation. Some search engines — among them Alta Vista — seek to visit every Web page in existence, read the contents of the home page, identify the most common words or keywords, and create a huge database of domain names with keywords. Sometimes the search engines will just read the meta tags and other keyword sections of the home page. This is faster, but Web designers often stuff an extraordinary number of keywords into their meta tags. The program that search engines unleash on the Web to perform this indexing function is called a spider or crawler. Unfortunately, as the number of Web pages climbs to over two billion, more and more pages are missed by the search engines. Google, perhaps the most complete search engine, contains references to only about half (one billion) of all Web pages. And the engines do not always overlap, which means you may miss a page on one engine, but pick it up on another. It’s best therefore to use multiple search engines. Other search engines use different strategies. As you learned in Chapter 2, Google uses a collaborative filtering technique: It indexes and ranks sites based on the number of users who request and land at a site. This method is biased by volume: You see the Web pages others have asked to see. Yahoo, on the other hand, uses a staff of human indexers to organize as many pages as they can. It is very difficult to get your site registered on Yahoo because of the limitations of their method, which is biased toward sites that somehow come to the attention of Yahoo staff. Once again, the best advice is to use several different search engines. Figure 3.21 lists the top search engines, based on the percentage of users estimated to have visited them during February 2001. One of the newest trends in search engines is focus; instead of trying to cover every possible information need that users have, some search engines are electing to specialize in one particular area. By limiting their coverage to such topics as sports, spam unsolicited e-mail search engine identifies Web pages that appear to match keywords, also called queries, typed by the user and provides a list of the best matches
Page 1 and 2: THE LARGER INTERNET II TECHNOLOGY E
Page 3 and 4: TABLE 3.5 MAJOR PHOTONICS OPPORTUNI
Page 5 and 6: INSIGHT ON BUSINESS Internet II: Th
Page 7 and 8: Internet II: The Future Infrastruct
Page 9 and 10: FIGURE 3.17 IP MULTICASTING A Unica
Page 11 and 12: text on a Web page and displayed it
Page 13 and 14: FIGURE 3.18 EXAMPLE HTML CODE (A) A
Page 15 and 16: FIGURE 3.19 SAMPLE XML CODE Sample
Page 17: • Search engine — Just as searc
Page 21 and 22: tion of interest to users, such as
Page 23 and 24: T he Internet and the Web: Features
Page 25 and 26: over 5,000 Ford and Lincoln Mercury
Page 27 and 28: FIGURE 3.22 THE GROWTH OF INTERNET
Page 29 and 30: T he Internet and the Web: Features
Page 31 and 32: advancing to the next level of a ga
Page 33 and 34: The history of the Internet can be
Page 35 and 36: andwidth and expanded connections o
Page 37 and 38: 2. What is latency and how does it
Page 39: WEB SITE RESOURCES www.LearnE-comme

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