Once you have a WWW browser running on your system, you're ready to decide where to begin your exploration of the Web. This might sound easy, but the sheer number of Web resources can make this choice difficult, confusing and maybe even discouraging.

Think of it as getting off a plane in a foreign country. If left to your own devices, a trip to an unfamiliar country would be something less than enjoyable. You're off the plane, can you find a hotel? Is it the best hotel for the money? What then? You might know of somewhere you want to go, but how to get there? And how can you be sure you're seeing everything there is to see?

Fortunately, because many people have experienced this bewilderment, most places around the world have tour guides, information bureaus, touring maps and so forth. While it's usually pretty basic, tourist information can help a new visitor see the popular places. Then he can enjoy himself without having to go to too much trouble with research or hit-and-miss exploration. As a tourist becomes more familiar with the place he's visiting, he starts to leave the beaten path to explore on his own. Having seen all the frequently visited attractions, he discovers less-known places and experiences the place in a whole new way.

The Web is very similar. A new visitor might need some help in finding a place to start. That is why there are places on the Web devoted to helping new users find their way around.

Many Web sites are considered jumping-off points because they contain links which are good for starting out, or jumping off, into the Web. Jumping-off points are like the travel agencies or information boothes of the Web. But new users are not the only people who can benefit from jumping-off points. Even experienced users will often want to start over in exploring the Web, perhaps to find things they haven't seen before. Jumping-off points are also useful to new and experienced users alike for finding newly-added sites on the Web.

There is no formal definition for jumping-off point, and not every jumping-off point will take you to a fabulous online experience. Still, most users will at some time want to make use of some kind of jumping-off point.

When you start up your browser, it will automatically load a default home page. Typically, the default home will be the institutional home page of the company or organization who created the browser. Netscape will load the Netscape Home Page, NCSA Mosaic will load the NCSA Home Page, and so on.

Default home pages are useful as jumping-off points for a couple reasons. First, they will include information about the browser you're using. Information about new versions of your browser, new features for your browser and information on using your browser, which can be very handy, especially to new users.

Also, institutional home pages have seen a lot of use and feedback, and are well-tailored to the needs and wants of new users. Netscape's home page, for example, has an area entitled, "Exploring the Net," wherein users can find sections like, "Best of the Net," "What's New," and "What's Hot."

But these default institutional home pages also have features and resources of their own - you could easily spend a few hours browsing Netscape's or NCSA's own resident links.

Service providers are companies or organizations which provide computer users with access to the Internet or a portion thereof. Commercial service providers, such as Delphi or Netcom, charge fees for access to the Internet. Other organizations, such as universities, may have membership, enrollment or employment requirements. Most service providers will maintain a Web site, which can be another good place to jump into browsing the Web.

Typically, service providers will have less information about your particular browser and more links to sites and resources around the Web. Service providers also offer links to home pages built by their own customers, students or employees, which are often great sources to find interesting links or specialized information. A service provider home page may also have resources of its own, such as a search engine, database or archive.

While it can be interesting to aimlessly click Web links and see where you end up, there will probably come a time when you will want to seek out some particular piece of information. You might need to research a topic for a paper or project. You might need a specific program or utility. You might have heard of a site you want to see but don't know its URL or address. When a need for specific information arises, search engines are the answer.

Like the name implies, search engines are powerful, machine-like utilities that help you search for a single piece of information in the vastness of the WWW.

While different search engines work in different ways, the basic idea is the same for all search engines. The user of an engine inputs a query - a topic, string or key word - and the search engine looks through its own internal database of Web information to find matches, or hits. The resulting matches are typically returned to the user as a list of clickable links that the user can browse.

Search engines also make good jumping-off points. Since they are, by definition, filled with a wealth of information about the Web and the Internet, search engines are usually equipped with accurate, comprehensive lists of pre-selected points-of-interest.

Below are the URLs to each of the search engines we'll cover.

Yahoo!	http://www.yahoo.com/
Webcrawler	http://webcrawler.com/
Lycos	http://www.lycos.com/

Yahoo!

Developed in 1994 by two Stanford University Ph.D. candidates and later invited to reside at Netscape Communications in Mountain View, Ca., Yahoo! is currently the largest and most popular search engine to be found on the WWW.

Yahoo! consists of a user interface, search software and a giant index of Web information. The index grows when individual Web users submit information (such as Web sites) about potential links.

While you can simply browse Yahoo! by looking through its pre-picked popular links or its what's new sections, you're more likely to use it to search for something particular. This is done with Yahoo!'s search form.

The Yahoo! search form can be found at virtually any point within Yahoo!, which makes it easy to start a new search or fine-tune a search in progress. To begin a search in Yahoo! find the search window and click it. Clicking the search window will produce a cursor-prompt, at which you can input text. At the prompt, type in your query (a key word, a title, a string of words, etc.).

Yahoo!'s search form is designed to accept a wide variety of search methods, which can be altered by toggling switches, or click boxes, on the form itself. For example, you can set Yahoo! to restrict its findings to URLs, page titles and/or comments within pages. You can also adjust other search parameters, such as case sensitivity and treatment of substrings.

After setting your search preferences and giving Yahoo! your keyword(s), click the Search button. Yahoo will search its entire database looking for matches. The result will be a collection of clickable links and descriptions which may end your search.

When using Yahoo!, remember that it yields hits of several kinds. The first, end-sites that match your query, is probably the kind you're looking for. End-sites are specific places on the Web that in some way match your search input. End-sites can be linked to directly from the Yahoo! search result page.

But there are other search results which can be just as useful, even though they might require a little more work. Yahoo! will not only return end-site matches, it will also return Yahoo! categories. That is, Yahoo! will show you a category (perhaps with several sub-catagories) with more links inside. Clicking category matches will take you to other Yahoo! pages, but eventually this will yield end-site matches as well.

The advantage to using Yahoo! is that it is an efficient, well-established search engine with a proven ability to be helpful to Web explorers. In 1995, Yahoo! secured corporate sponsorship which expanded its potential and utility.

The disadvantage of Yahoo! is that it is so big and powerful, a user may feel swamped by an endless list of categorical and end-site hits for a given query. Also, Web sites in Yahoo!'s database are self-selected - operators of Web sites ask Yahoo! to include them. This gives Yahoo! a tendency to find matches that belong to "big" sites - companies, large universities, etc. - who have asked to be listed. Few if any smaller, individually maintained sites are likely to be found using Yahoo!. For this reason, Yahoo! will frequently miss out-of-the way sites which, while they may not be as big or well-funded, can be very interesting.

WebCrawler

WebCrawler, an Internet index and search tool created in 1994 by a University of Washington student, is currently operated by America OnLine as a free service to the Internet community.

Unlike other search engines, WebCrawler is a Web robot. That is, WebCrawler's programming allows it to search the WWW on its own, researching links and collecting information about the Web. This information, along with information submitted by Web users, is then compiled in a database which can be browsed or searched.

To begin a search in WebCrawler, find the search window and click it. This will produce a cursor-prompt, at which you can input text. At the prompt, type in your query. You can broaden or narrow a search with more than one keyword by clicking (or un-clicking) the click box labeled AND words together. When you have entered your query, click the Search button. In a few moments WebCrawler will return a list of clickable search results.

WebCrawler differs from other search engines in that it is content-based, instead of category-based. This means that all matches will be end-site matches. While this will allow you to start looking at places on the Web right away instead of searching through matching catagories and sub-catagories, you may find that doing so is just as tedious.

For example, if you were looking for information about dogs and training dogs, you might start a broad search on WebCrawler by using the word "dogs." WebCrawler would return a great number of matches, but you would find that WebCrawler's content-based matching system would consider any mention of dogs enough to constitute a hit. For this reason, when using WebCrawler, try to make your search as specific as possible in order to screen out spurious and useless results.

The advantage of WebCrawler is that it actually strikes out on its own to find Web information instead of waiting for information to be sent to it. To the search engine user this may mean a larger variety of search results. It also means that you're more likely to find obscure, backwater sites that may prove useful or entertaining.

On the down side, WebCrawler will give a searcher anything and everything it finds in the form of an end-site, which the searcher must then examine - if the number of matches is large enough, this site-by-site investigation can become very tedious and/or fruitless.

Lycos

Headquartered at Carnegie Mellon Universtiy, Lycos is a search engine which, in some ways, brings you the best of WebCrawler and Yahoo!.

First, Lycos displays information about each match and then invites you to view the match. This allows the user to see what it is about a match that makes it a match, without having to load, view and search it himself.

Lets go back to our example about a query for information about dogs. If you were looking for information on dog training and you used the word "dogs" as your query, a search engine might find a home page that mentioned Pink Floyd's song, "Dogs of War." In another search engine, you might have to look at the home page yourself to ascertain why the site was considered a hit, only to find that the match wasn't what you were interested in. In Lycos, the content of the hit is displayed before you actually go to a end-site match. This can save a lot of time.

At the same time, Lycos is a Web-crawling searcher. It goes out and explores links and the content of sites (up to 5,000 per day) and stores them in its database. This gives you the categorical discipline of Yahoo! and the broad, unbiased sampling power of WebCrawler.

To use Lycos, find the search window and click it. Clicking the search window will activate a cursor-prompt at which can enter text. At the prompt, type in your query. You can narrow or broaden a search using symbols like the period (.), hyphen (-) and dollar sign ($), (see Lycos Help to see how). After entering your query, click the Start search button. In a few moments, Lycos will show you a list of search results in the form of end-site matches. Below the list, a description of each match is displayed, along with the information which qualified it as a match to your search.

The advantage of Lycos, as described above, is that it has the best features of two of the largest search engines on the Web. The way in which Lycos searches the web on its own, and the method by which it displays matches makes Lycos a very powerful search tool. However, Lycos seems to be available from fewer sites around the net, suggesting that it is less-known than some of the more established search engines. For this reason, you may that Lycos' search results are less comprehensive.

The World Wide Web, in its present form, has been accessible to the general public for only a few years, but in that time its growth has been, and continues to be, explosive. While the Web falls very short of housing the informational sum total of the human experience, the amount of useful and entertaining information on the Web is nothing short of amazing.

Still, while one could make an occupation of surfing through the endless links of the Web, it's important to understand and remember that there is more to the Internet and the Web than hypertext.

The bulk of useful information on the Internet is made up of files of varying formats stored on networked computers. Hypertext files are those that you reference when you're on the Web - they contain information which is cross-referenced, via links, to other information in a point-and-click environment. However, there are many other kinds of information, documents and files available to you from the Web and other Internet areas. There are computer programs, games, digitized images, digitized sounds and even digitized video, all of which you can download to your own computer.

The non-Hypertext files you'll find on the Web can be identified by their file extensions. A file extension is the 2-, 3- or 4-letter suffix attached to a file name. For example, in the filename BLADERUNNER.TXT, the 3-letter suffix .TXT is the file extension. In this case, the extension identifies the file as a plain text file. As you navigate the Web, it's helpful to be versed in the most commonly found file types.

Plain Text Files

Plain text files, as you might guess, are documents in a simple textual format and identified by the extension .TXT. When you view a plain text file, it will be displayed in as simple a fashion as possible, with no variance in font, text size, color or layout.

Not only are Netscape and Mosaic automatically configured to view plain text files, but text files can be viewed and manipulated in a host of other utilities, from Windows' Notepad to Macintosh's TeachText. Almost any word processor will also read text files.

Plain text files are used to store information that doesn't have any layout or design requirements, like informational or descriptive items. For example, in the Talking Heads home page, much of the descriptive information on the history of that band is available in text files. Plain text files can be viewed online or you can download text files to a local computer for viewing, editing or printing.

Postscript Files

You may be familiar with Postscript as being a printer-control language. But it also serves well as a document layout language which allows for virtually any control of text, objects, fonts, lines, etc.

You should be able to recognize Postscript files on the Net by their .PS file extension.

Most Web browsers are not configured to display Postscript data. Therefore, you will need a Helper Application, such as Ghostscript, to facilitate the viewing of Postscript files.

Image Files

As the name implies, image files are digitized images, or graphics, stored in a readable format. The most common types of image files are GIF files (Graphic Interchange Format) and JPEG files (Joint Photographic Experts Group). These files are, not surprisingly, identified by the file extensions .GIF and .JPG. Other image files include those with the extensions .BMP, .XBM, and .TIFF.

Netscape is already configured to view both JPEG and GIF files. Other graphical browsers can view GIF files. But to view other image files you will have to acquire and configure seperate helper applications.

Image files are used extensively throughout the Web to illustrate and decorate home pages. When you load a page which is accompanied by images, chances are the images are either GIFs or JPEGs. But image files can also be used in other ways. After downloading image files to a local computer, you could use them in desktop publishing or multimedia composition. Image files can also be stored on a computer drive or disk for simple entertainment value. Finally, image files can often be converted for use on a personal computer (as screen saver images or wallpaper, for example).

Note: when using image files, you should be mindful not to violate copyrights or other content restrictions.

Sound Files

Sound files are much like image files, except that sound files contain digitized sounds instead of images. The most common sound file types are .AU and .WAV files, which can be recognized by their respective file extensions. Other sound formats you're likely to encounter are .AIFF and .SND files.

You're most likely to need some sort of Helper Application to play sound files because browsers don't have the built-in capability of doing it. The Netscape Navigator distribution comes with a simple multi-format sound player called NAPLAYER.

While not as common as image files, sound files are plentiful on the Internet, especially in FTP archives. Many Web sites use sounds to add life to text and images. A home page dedicated to Herber Walker's Dune series, for instance, features sounds from the film Dune. The They Might Be Giants home page has an area where you can download whole songs which are unavailable elsewhere.

Sound files can be downloaded to a local computer for offline use. While perhaps not as useful as image files, sound files can be used in multimedia works or they can be used to add bells and whistles to personal computer operations which may otherwise be somewhat mundane.

Note: Sounds, such as music, can be copyrighted. Use of such resources should be limited to that which does not violate copyrights or other restrictions.

Video Files

Video files are very similar to image files, except they display images in sequence to simulate film or video. The most common types of video files are MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) files and QuickTime files, which can be identified by the extensions .MPG (or .MPEG) and .MOV respectively.

At the time of this printing, Netscape, and other graphical browsers, are not automatically configured to play video files. In order to use video files you must acquire and configure specialized players as helper applications.

Used in much the same way as image or sound files, video files are less common (for now, anyway) on the Web because of the rigorous hardware and software requirements in producing and viewing them. In general, video files require large amounts of storage space and memory to run, not to mention the need for specialized software. However, viewers are available for the higher-performance personal computers on the market today.

However, if your computer is equal to the task of playing video files, you'll find they can be very entertaining. Newer video formats even incorporate sound. And if you have room to store video files, they are very useful in multimedia production (or just use them to impress your friends).

Note: Most video is copyrighted in one respect or another. Use of video files should be limited to what is allowed by copyright and other applicable restrictions.

Limiting your exploration of the Internet to the WWW is like going to Beverly Hills and then shopping only at women's shoe stores. There are many other locations on the Internet where information is stored. There are also services and utilities available outside the Web but often accessible from the Web that the Web itself can't or doesn't offer in hypertext format.

FTP Archives

FTP archives are huge collections of files of various kinds available for transfer to anyone with an account on a computer which is connected to the Internet. In such archives you might find text files, programs for your computer, games, image files, sound files and video files. In the past, these files were taken from the Internet for use on personal computers using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). While FTP is fairly simple to use, many FTP sites have been made accessible from the Web. This makes files in FTP sites available by point-and-click.

Further, menu-driven services like Gopher can help you locate FTP sites or specific files. The point is, exploring FTP sites, regardless of the method you use, can be be just as productive, interesting and/or entertaining as browsing Hypertext documents.

Accessing FTP sites through the Web is done through the ftp: URL scheme.

Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet News is a system of message groups, composed of the input of individual Internet users from around the world. These message groups, known as newsgroups, are listed and used according to topic. At the time of this printing, there were more than 15,000 newsgroups, with topics ranging from biological engineering to mountain biking to world politics.

While Usenet newsgroups do not typically contain news in the journalistic sense, they are a rich source of user information, opinion and discussion.

Like the Web, newsgroups contain loads of information volunteered by users like yourself. One major difference, however, is that in Newsgroups, input is transmitted almost instantly to computers all over the Internet, enabling you to enter into ongoing discussions with other people from almost anywhere in the world. Also, newsgroups are great places to exchange tips on other Internet sites and resources. And of course, Usenet News is now accessible via the Web, making it even easier to use.

Newsgroups can be accessed from the Web via the news: URL scheme.

Bulletin Board Systems

Many computers on the Internet are home to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Like the name suggests, BBSs are virtual post-up areas where users can exchange information and interact with each other.

BBSs offer many services. On some you'll find file storage areas much like FTP archives. Some have discussion groups like those found in Usenet News. Others have online chat systems where users can text-talk in real time with one another. Of course many BBSs will offer all these services and more, such as mail service, multi-user dimensions (MUDs) and online games. Most larger BBSs are also accessible from the WWW.

BBSs and other similar online services are accessible via Telnet. Accessing such sites from the Web will be through the telnet: URL scheme. This scheme, as mentioned before, usually requires some sort of helper application to be launched from your Web browser.

Other Net Services

Gopher and WAIS are also substantial sources of information on the Internet. As noted previously, you can access this information from the Web via URL schemes gopher: and wais:.

As the Internet and the WWW grow in size and scope, more and more commercial services are available online. These may range at from simple Net advertisements to virtual money systems.

The most common commercial services to be found on the Web are online catalogs and order forms. After viewing a pictorial or textual catalog online, a user can fill out an order form (sometimes including a credit card number) to make a purchase.

While this method of shopping is convenient and is becoming very popular, a cautionary discussion is in order.

Risks

Information on the Internet (and the WWW) almost never travels directly from the sender to the receiver. Before a message (like an order from a catalog) reaches its intended recipient, it will travel, in the form of information packets, through many of the computer systems that make up the Internet. Most of the time, these packets of information are not secure. That is, the information can be intercepted, viewed and even changed by someone with access to the computer systems between the sender and the receiver. This makes sending your credit card numbers out over the Web a dubious undertaking.

Think of the mail (the paper kind) you receive in your mail box every day. Everything of any importance that is sent through the mail is secured in sealed envelopes, some of which are even printed with opaque patterns for even more security. Access to the mail is vigorously controlled and opening envelopes is, obviously, prohibited to all but the addressee.

If you compare the Internet to mail, you would have to say that at present, the Internet is a postal service in which nearly everything is sent in open envelopes. The contents of these envelopes, while ostensibly intended only for their recipient, can be viewed, copied and changed by many people along the mail route.

Obviously, the risk here is that someone will intercept your information and put it to uses other than what you intend. There are programs on certain computers on the Internet whose purpose is to sniff out and capture information of a certain type. Credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive information often has a recognizable pattern, and sniffing programs can find and intercept such information with little or no human assistance.

This is not to say that every nugget of sensitive data is going to grabbed and exploited by some unprincipled grifter - far from it. Transactions are conducted on the Internet and the Web every day without incident. But the risks are real and should be taken into consideration each time you think about using money or credit cards on the Web or Internet.

Secure Servers

One way to eliminate the risks of using money on the Web is to use secure servers. Secure servers are like any other Web server in the way they support Web sites, with one difference: secure servers encrypt data sent to and from them. That is, secure servers put their information packets into sealed envelopes that can be opened only be the addressee.

There are several developing standards for secure information exchange on the World Wide Web. Two of the outstanding proposals have been Secure HTTP (SHTTP), which is an add-on to NCSA's HTTP server and Netscape's SSL Secure Transport Layer.

In order to establish an encrypted connection with a computer host, the host must be running some sort of a secure WWW server and you must be using a client browser which has the ability to communicate with that secure WWW server.

Netscape's Netsite server software is gaining popularity as a server solution because of the number of Internet users who are using the Netscape Navigator as their client browser. When you connect to a secure Netscape server, you will probably have the option of going into Secure Mode. When you choose this option, two things happen to the Netscape Navigator browser application. First of all, the broken key at the bottom of the browser window becomes an unbroken key and a blue bar appears above the document data.

The figure below shows the two Netscape Navigator keys both in non-secure and secure mode:

PGP

Developed by programmer Phil Zimmerman and available for free on the Internet, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is an public-key encryption system that anyone in the United States can use. PGP can encode information, such as e-mail, in such a way that no one but the in tended recipient can open it.

PGP works by using keys. These keys are logarithmic codes which scramble (or descramble) the contents of an information packet. Each person has a public key and a private key. The public key is freely distributed to friends or associates, while the private key is kept secret. When a person wants to send a secure message, he uses the addressee's public key to encrypt it. Only someone with the matching private key can decrypt the message, making the information safe and sound to travel the Internet someone intercepting an encrypted message only gets scrambled gibberish with no way to make sense of it.

PGP encryption can also enable a sender to make his own messages verifiably authentic. To send an unalterable, authentic message, the sender first encrypts the message using his own private key. The receiver of the message then decrypts the message using the sender's public key (which is available publicly). In this way, the receiver knows that only someone with access to the sender's private key could have encrypted the message.

The important thing here, obviously, is to keep private keys very private.

PGP can reduce or even eliminate the risks of being defrauded on the net, but learning how to use PGP is not easy and most Internet users are not acquainted with it. So, while PGP is very effective, learning to use it and finding other people to use it with will be difficult.

Financial Services on the Web

There are financial institutions which are setting up store on the Internet for the purpose of handling credit transactions between Internet users and companies selling goods and services on the Internet.

In order to use one of these services to purchase over the Internet, you need to set up an account and the company you are doing business with would need to also set up a merchant account. Then, to purchase something from that business, you would refer to your account with the financial institution and then the institution would handle the transfer of funds from your credit card to the business.

The URLs of some institutions which are currently doing this are listed below:

First Virtual	http://www.fv.com/
Cybercash	http://www.cybercash.com/
Digicash (e-cash)	http://www.digicash.com/

Other Transaction Methods

In addition to using secure servers, PGP, or virtual money, some businesses are offering other methods of securing financial transactions.

Since the possibility of someone sniffing your credit number from within network traffic is unlikely, some services will ask you to send your number to them once and then they will store the number on a computer system which is not connected to the Internet (thus, preventing it from being subject to invading attacks from the Internet).

Other companies may offer a toll-free phone number which you can call and give your credit card number to set up an account. This account would then be tied to your e-mail address, which you would use to authenticate any financial transactions with the company.