Review of last lecture : a brief history of Internet and the Web

• After the invention in the 40's of modern computers, the idea of connecting them via telephone lines was inescapable. It was successfully achieved for the first time in 1965.
• Then Internet became inescapable as well.
• Two other inventions played a key role :
• Packet switching, that makes for very robust transmissions (hard to cut by the ennemy)
  (At first ATT engineers, when they heard of packet switching, declared : "This idea is as stupid an idea as, say, transporting petrol from the oil fields to the final consumer in tea cups via various routes." It turned out they were wrong. But their image is a very good one !)
• Micro-computers that, from the very beginning around 1978 (Apple II), put information technology in the hands of the general public. The fast development of micro-computers was helped by "killer apps" such as Visicalc
• Then there only remained to generalize client-server architecture for Internet to take off and know the fantastic development of the late 90's and today
• That's not the end of the story, one may guess,...
• E-commerce is one of these new phenomena made possible by Internet. No doubt others are to come.

So Internet was created in the late 60's early 70's :

• It is a huge worldwide library, containing the best as well as the worst
• It is a worldwide network ("network of networks" would be more correct) connecting information servers and end-users. The information delivered is anything that can be represented electronically.
• And now Internet is an E-commerce support.

While The Web  was only invented in the early 90's (twenty years after Internet) :

• The Web (accessible via https://...) is only a part of Internet. The rest, accessible via ftp://ftp..., is much larger and not nearly as well charted.

The techniques to find information :

A research that, as recently as 1990, would take several weeks to be carried out, and could require trips to different parts of the world, now can be completed in only a few hours.

Searching libraries, newspapers, trade publications, specialized databases, and contacting specialists, all this can be done from one micro-computer connected to the Net.

The technology is different, but the principles are the same :

1. First Know what you are looking for : market data, information on products, competitors, technologies, production methods, financial data, patents, key events, new players, etc.
2. Organize your questions logically and formulate them in natural language
3. Transform them into keywords
4. Find the "good sites" bearing information relevant to your topic
5. Just like in real life a good person to get information from is usually a well known person, a good site usually is a site that many other sites point to with hyperlinks
6. Use the link command to find out how many sites point to a given site
7. For instance, with Altavista, check whether https://www.cuisineaz.com is better known or not as well known as https://www.allrecipes.com 
8. Use the command link:https://www.cuisineaz.com and then the command link:https://www.allrecipes.com for that
9. This yields one measurement of the reliablility and trustworthiness of a page
10. Using Newsgroups and Mailing lists, find experts in the field you are interested in ; find the name of people having discussions with experts (other experts)
11. Outlook Express is a convenient software to consult the Newsgroups. You may prefer another one (for instance Free Agent).
12. On Newsgroups respect the Netiquette :
    Just like in real life before entering a group of people having a discussion you will listen to them without talking, before posting a question on a Newsgroup read a sample of messages of the Newsgroup, to get a  feel of the Newsgroup, and check whether your question hasn't already been answered several times
    If you don't respect the Netiquette you'll probably sooner or later get "flamed" (see below).
    If you respect the Netiquette, you are likely to get an answer to your question within minutes !
13. The notion of "thread"
14. The notion of "flame" (for instance on Google Groups with the search : +astronomy +planets +images ; the third thread presents a flame.)
15. Use the search engines to find out more about the experts you have identified : where they work, what they are specialized in, what they published, etc.
16. On any given specialized topic it takes only a few hours to know everything the Web has to offer
17. Finally, after having properly used the Newsgroups you can contact directly, via e-mail or even the telephone, the experts you wish to have a discussion with.
18. You'll be amazed how willing and happy people are to talk about what they know well
19. Be prepared not only to ask questions, and get information, but also to give information

The Web_tools page on lapasserelle

Directories and engines

• At first : directories = human classification ; engines = robots.
• The difference is fading : Yahoo offers engine services too, and Google has a directory (see the page google services)
• Altavista : Digital, Louis Monier… ; for several years Altavista was "the" reference ; then it was superseded by Google.
• Google (created in 1998, lauched in 1999) : more intelligent search results classification (it uses refinements of the link measurement method)
• Work with Altavista and Google with various keywords and study the results and the differences between the two engines
• Syntax
• +cancer +astrology
• +cancer -astrology
• Truncation (as of october 2002 Google still does not accept it)
• +astron* +planet* +image*
• Page translation service by Altavista and by Google
• The very useful "cache" function of Google : when a page has disappeared Google still has a copy in cache.

Visit these sites

• Dell
• National Semiconductor
• Hertz
• Amazon
• National Science Foundation
• Wells Fargo
• Boeing
• Dow Jones
• General Motors
• Cisco
• American Airlines
• Paypal
• Fnac
• Rue du Commerce
• Alapage
• Top Achat
• Surcouf
• Eveil et Jeux

(find the exact addresses using your favorite search engine...)

Sites typology : look and feel, objectives, etc.

Differences between french and american sites

Other useful tools

Meta engines Ixquick, Metacrawler and Copernic (the two former are online engines, the latter installs a software on your machine). The syntax is rudimentary, to jive with all consulted engines

Newsgroups (mostly Deja/Google - see above), Mailing lists (mostly Topica/Lizt - less useful than Newsgroups or at least not nearly as "interactive" for a search... ). Francopholistes, GetZeNews, Yahoo Groups, etc.

Intelligent agents : they go one step further than engines : they download onto your machine interesting pages (related to keywords you gave) therefore enabling you to do local work, filtering, analyzing, etc.

Webseeker (price : about $30) the reference in Intelligent agents

Umap a very ambitious and sophisticated tool : following your keywords, or even sentence in plain english, it finds and downloads a large number of pages, then it creates a thesaurus of words found in the downloaded pages,  measures "closeness" of words in the pages, and finally constructs a chart, with "islands" of related words or concepts. Avantages : gives plenty of addresses and even more importantly gives more ideas, more research themes. Drawbacks : delicate to interpret and not particularly user-friendly.

Teleport Pro (belongs to the "Pull" technology) : sweeps onto your machine a more or less complete site you want to look at at leisure . Iwas useful mostly when Internet connexions were slow and costly. It can also monitor page changes. Teleport pro is not performant with active pages.

The Push : Tracerlock, NetMind, Moreover News, etc.

FTP (difference with HTTP ; it's twenty years older…). With FTP your are (to some extent) within somebody else's computer. Now well known browsers have FTP downward capabilities, but not yet FTP upward.