Back / Forward These buttons are displayed in most browsers' Tool Button Bar, upper left. “Back” returns you to the document / page previously viewed. “Forward” goes to the next document / page, after you go back.
Blog or Web Log Short for "web log", which is a type of web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal (or log) for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author. Blog software usually has an archive of old blog postings. Many blogs can be searched for terms in the archive. Blogs have become a vibrant, fast-growing medium for communication in professional, poltical, news, trendy, and other specialized web communities. Many blogs provide RSS feeds, to which one can subscribe and receive alerts to new postings in selected blogs.
Bookmark Browsers store links to websites you wish to return to. Firefox and Safari use the term Bookmarks. The equivalent in Internet Explorer (IE) is called a "Favourite." To create a bookmark, click on “Bookmarks” or “Favourites”, then “Add”. Or left-click on and drag the little bookmark icon to the place you want a new bookmark filed. To visit a bookmarked site, click on “Bookmarks” or “Favourites” and select the website from the list.
Browse To follow links in a page, to shop around in a page, exploring what's there, a bit like window shopping. The opposite of browsing a page is searching it. When you search a page, you find a search box, enter terms, and find all occurrences of the terms throughout the site. When you browse, you have to guess which words on the page pertain to your interests. Searching is usually more efficient, but sometimes you find things by browsing that you might not find because you might not think of the "right" term to search by.
Browsers Software programs that enable you to view WWW documents. They "translate" HTML-encoded files into the text, images, sounds, and other features you see. Microsoft Internet Explorer (called simply IE), Firefox and Safari are examples of "graphical" browsers that enable you to view text and images and many other WWW features. They are software that must be installed on your computer.
Cache In browsers, "cache" is used to identify a space where web pages you have visited are stored in your computer. A copy of documents you retrieve is stored in cache. When you use “Go”, “Back”, or any other means to revisit a document, the browser first checks to see if it is in cache and will retrieve it from there because it is much faster than retrieving it from the server.
Cached Link In search results from a Google, and from some other search engines, there is usually a “cached link”, which allows you to view the version of a page that the search engine has stored in its database. The live page on the web might differ from this cached copy, because the cached copy dates from whenever the search engine's spider last visited the page and detected modified content. Use the “cached link” to see when a page was last crawled and, in Google, where your terms are and why you got a page when all of your search terms are not in it. Most large search engines operate several robots all the time. Even so, the Internet is so large that it can take six months for spiders to cover it, resulting in a certain degree of "out-of-datedness" in all the search engines.
Cookie A message sent from a Web Server computer to your browser and stored by your browser on your computer. When your computer consults the originating server computer, the cookie is sent back to the server, allowing it to respond to you according to the cookie's contents. The main use for cookies is to provide customised Web pages according to a profile of your interests. When you log onto a "customise" type of invitation on a Web page and fill in your name and other information, this may result in a cookie on your computer which that Web page will access to appear to "know" you and provide what you want. If you fill out these forms, you may also receive e-mail and other solicitation independent of cookies.
Crawler or Web Crawler Computer robot programs, which are also referred to as "spiders", "knowledge-bots" or "knowbots", are used by search engines to roam the Internet to keep the search engine database up to date with any changes to the web pages. They obtain new pages, update known pages, delete obsolete ones and integrate their findings into the "home" database for each website.
Domain This is the hierarchical scheme for indicating logical and sometimes geographical venue of a web-page from the network. In the UK, common domains are .edu.uk (education), .gov.uk (government agency), .co.uk. This is also referred to as the “Top Level Domain” or TLD.
Domain Name This refers to the initial part of a URL, down to the first /, where the domain and name of the host or server computer are listed (most often in reversed order, name first, then domain). The domain name gives you who "published" a page, made it public by putting it on the Web.
Domain Name Server (DNS) Entry A domain name is translated in huge tables standardized across the Internet into a numeric IP address unique the host computer sought. These tables are maintained on computers called "Domain Name Servers." Whenever you ask the browser to find a URL, the browser must consult the table on the domain name server that particular computer is networked to consult.
Download To copy something from a primary source to a more peripheral one, as in saving something found on the Web (currently located on its server) to a file on your local hard drive.
Favourites Browsers store links to websites you wish to return to. Firefox and Safari use the term Bookmarks. The equivalent in Internet Explorer (IE) is called a "Favourite." To create a bookmark, click on “Bookmarks” or “Favourites”, then “Add”. Or left-click on and drag the little bookmark icon to the place you want a new bookmark filed. To visit a bookmarked site, click on “Bookmarks” or “Favourites” and select the website from the list.
Feed Reader A software package that enables you to easily read RSS feeds, which are written in XML code.
Freshness How up-to-date a search engine database is, based primarily on how often its spiders re-circulate around the Web and update their copies of the web pages they hold, and discover new ones. Also determined by how quickly they integrate new sites that web authors send to them. Two weeks is about as good as most search engines do, but some update certain selected web sites more frequently, even daily.
Frames A format for web documents that divides the screen into hierarchically structured segments. It is not used in modern websites, because it impedes access by search engine spiders.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) A means of transferring entire files from one computer to another. It was used extensively by website owners to update the contents of their websites, but modern websites include online content management facilities that allow this updating to be made via normal website access.
Head or Header The top portion of the HTML source code behind any web page, which begins with <HEAD> and ending with </HEAD> is its “Head” or “Header”. This contains the Title, Description, Keywords fields and others that web page authors may use to describe the page. The title is displayed in the title bar of most browsers, but the other fields cannot be seen as part of the body of the page. The <HEAD> portion of a web page can be viewed in your browser as part of the “page source.” Search engines automatically retrieve the text contained in these fields.
Host The “Host” is the computer that provides web-documents to clients or users. See also “Server”.
HTML The acronym for “Hypertext Markup Language”. This is a standardized language of computer code, imbedded in "source" documents behind all web documents. It contains the textual content, images, links to other documents, other applications such as sound, video or animation, and formatting instructions for display on the screen. When you view a Web page, you are looking at the product of this code working behind the scenes in conjunction with your browser. All browsers are programmed to automatically interpret HTML for display. HTML often imbeds within it other programming languages and applications such as ASP (Active Server Pages), XML, JavaScript and more. It is possible to deliver or access and execute virtually any program via the Internet.
Hypertext The feature built into HTML that allows a text area, an image, or other object to become a "link" (as if in a chain) that retrieves another computer file, which may be another web page, image, sound file, or other document, on the Internet. The range of possibilities is limited by the ability of the computer retrieving the outside file to view, play, or otherwise open the incoming file. It needs to have software that can interact with the imported file. Many software capabilities of this type are built into browsers or can be added as "plug-ins" or “ActiveX Components.
Internet The Internet is a collection of interconnected networks that all use the TCP / IP protocols.
An "intranet" is a private network inside a company or organization that uses the same kinds of software that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use. An intranet may be on the Internet or may simply be a network.
IP (Internet Protocol) Address / Number IP number or address is a unique number consisting of four parts separated by dots, such as 195.12.14.113. Every computer or network of computers that is on the Internet has a unique IP address. Most computers connected to the Internet also have one or more Domain Names that are easier for people to remember than IP addresses.
ISP or Internet Service Provider An ISP is a company that sells Internet connections. Often these companies also provide hosting services for websites.
JavaScript A simple programming language developed that enables greater interactivity between the person browsing a web page and the content of that page. It interacts with the HTML to provide a direct response to user inputs on the browser and enabling dynamic content and motion.
Keywords(s) A word searched for in a search command. Keywords can be searched in several ways, either in combination or separately.
Link The URL imbedded in another document, so that if you click on the highlighted text or button referring to the link, you retrieve the outside URL.
Meta Search Engine Search engines that automatically submit your keyword search to several other search tools, and retrieve results from all their databases.
PDF or .pdf or pdf file This is an abbreviation for Portable Document Format, a file format developed by Adobe Systems. It is used to capture almost any kind of document with the formatting in the original. Viewing a PDF file requires Acrobat Reader, which is built into most browsers and can be downloaded free from Adobe.
Plug-In An application built into a browser or added to a browser to enable it to interact with a special file type (such as a movie, sound file, Word document, etc.)
Popularity Ranking One of the ways in which search engines rank the order in which search results appear is based on how many other websites link to each page. This is a kind of popularity vote based on the assumption that other pages would create a link to the "best" pages.
It can result in a reduced ranking if used to excess.
Relevancy Ranking This is the most common method for determining the order in which search results are displayed. Each search engine uses its own unique algorithms for this and Google has by far the most sophisticated algorithms. These are based on how often your terms occur in documents, whether they occur together as a phrase, and whether they are in title or how near the top of the text.
RSS / RSS Feeds Short for "Really Simple Syndication". It is also known as “Rich Site Summary” or “RDF Site Summary”. It refers to a group of XML based web-content distribution and republication formats primarily used by news sites and Weblogs (Blogs). Any website can issue an RSS feed. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you are alerted to new additions to the feed since you last read it. In order to read RSS feeds, you must use a "feed reader," which formats the XML code into an easily readable format (feed readers are to XML and RSS feeds as web browsers are to HTML and web pages.
Server / Web Server A computer running software, assigned an IP address, and connected to the Internet so that it can provide documents via the World Wide Web. It is also referred to as a “Host” computer. Web servers are the closest equivalent to what in the print world is called the "publisher" of a print document, but anyone can be a publisher on the Internet.
Server-Side This refers to anything that operates on the "server" computer, which provides the web pages, as opposed to the "client" computer, which you or someone else uses to view the Web pages. Usually it is a program or command or procedure or other application causes dynamic pages or animation or other interaction.
Site or Website A "website," is the location for a collection of related “web pages”. Each web page within a web site has a unique URL associated with it. For example, this website is www.CompanionComputers.co.uk. Each of its pages has a URL that contains this domain name, either explicitly or implicitly.
Spiders Computer robot programs, which are also referred to as "crawlers", "knowledge-bots" or "knowbots", are used by search engines to roam the Internet to keep the search engine database up to date with any changes to the web pages. They obtain new pages, update known pages, delete obsolete ones and integrate their findings into the "home" database for each website.
Most large search engines operate several robots all the time. Even so, the Internet is so large that it can take six months for spiders to cover it, resulting in a certain degree of "out-of-datedness" in all the search engines.
Subject Based Popularity Ranking A variation on popularity ranking in which the links found in web pages on the same subject are used to rank the search results.
TCP / IP Short for “Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol”. This is the suite of protocols that defines the Internet. To be truly on the Internet, your computer must have TCP/IP software, which is built in to all browsers.
Title The official title of an HTML document is contained is "Meta" field called “Title”.
The text of this “Meta” title field may or may not also occur in the visible body of the document. It is what appears in the top bar of the window when you display the document and it is the title that appears in search engine results. The "meta" field called title is not mandatory in HTML coding. Sometimes you retrieve a document with "No Title" as its supposed title, which is caused when the meta-title field is left blank.
URL An abbreviation of “Uniform Resource Locator”. This is the unique address of any web document (page). It may be keyed in a browser's “Open”, “Location” or “Got To” box to retrieve a document.
XHTML An abbreviation of “Extensible Hypertext Markup Language”. It is a hybrid between HTML and XML that is more universally acceptable in Web pages and search engines than XML.
XML An abbreviation of “Extensible Markup Language”, which is not readily viewable in ordinary browsers and is used primarily as a source of data that can be manipulation by JavaScript to display the information on the browser. It is ideally suited to parts of the pages, such as in a product catalogue, which can be changed within an page that otherwise has a fixed content.