I. What are websites?

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a set of related web pages served from a single web domain. This is a set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web. It is basically a collection of web pages stored on a particular computer (called a web server) and accessed by outside computers. The site creator puts the files on the web server.

A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors.

Webpages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user of the webpage content. The user's application, often a web browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal.

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a simple Uniform Resource Locator (URL) called the web address. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although hyperlinking between them conveys the reader's perceived site structure and guides the reader's navigation of the site which generally includes a home page with most of the links to the site's web content, and a supplementary about, contact and link page.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, parts of news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards, web-based email, social networking websites, websites providing real-time stock market data, and websites providing various other services (e.g., websites offering storing and/or sharing of images, files and so forth).

II. Give 10 different websites.

A. Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include search, cloud computing, software and online advertising technologies. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil". In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex.

B. Yahoo

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is widely known for its web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports and its social media website. It is one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visit

Yahoo! websites every month. Yahoo! itself claims it attracts "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages."

Yahoo! Inc. was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On July 16, 2012, former Google executive Marissa Mayer was named as Yahoo! CEO and President, effective July 17, 2012.

C. Youtube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, while registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users at least 18 years old. YouTube, LLC was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion in November 2006 and now operates as a Google subsidiary.

D. Facebook

Facebook is an online social networking service, whose name stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. It was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.

E. MSN

MSN (originally The Microsoft Network; stylized as msn) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system. The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its initial release in 1995. MSN was once a simple online service for Windows 95, an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet, and one of the most popular dial-up Internet service providers. MSN was primarily a popular Internet portal.

Microsoft used the MSN brand name to promote numerous popular web-based services in the late 1990s, most notably Hotmail and Microsoft Messenger service, before reorganizing many of them in 2005 under another brand name, Windows Live. MSN.com was the 17th most visited domain name on the Internet.

F. Amazon

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational electronic commerce company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world’s largest online retailer. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, video and MP3 downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food toys, and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics—notably the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the Kindle Fire tablet computer—and is a major provider of cloud computing services.

G. Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet." Unregistered users can read tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices.

Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City, Boston, and San Antonio.

H. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 286 languages, including over 4.2 million in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone having access to the site and not being blocked. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking seventh globally among all websites on Alexa as of June 2013, and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

I. eBay

eBay Inc. is an American multinational internet consumer-to-consumer corporation, headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble; it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries. The company manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. In addition to its auction-style selling, the website has since expanded to include "Buy It Now" standard shopping; shopping by UPC, ISBN, or other kind of SKU (via Half.com); online classified advertisements (via Kijiji or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); online money transfers (via PayPal) and other services.

J. Bing

Bing is a web site from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego for release on June 1. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset which Microsoft purchased in 2008.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners were expected to have made the transition by early 2012.

In October 2011, Bing announced it was working on new back-end search infrastructure, with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology has been incorporated into Bing globally, since August 2011. In May 2012, Bing announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query.

III. What is meant by “surfing the internet”?

The term surf, used in the context of "surf the Web", refers to the practice of browsing through Web sites: jumping from one link to the other, following items of interest, watching videos, and consuming all sorts of content; all on a variety of different sites. Since the Web is essentially a series of links, surfing the Web has become a very popular activity with millions of people across the world. It also refers to navigate through the World Wide Web or Internet, usually by clicking with a mouse. You are surfing the waves of information in a flow coming from the World Wide Web. The term also has a generic meaning of spending time on the Internet.

IV. What are the different search engines downloading of text and graphics?

A. Google Search

Google Search (or Google Web Search) is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services.

B. Bing Search

Bing (known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft.

C. Yahoo Search

Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009, the 2nd largest search directory on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications.

D. AltaVista

AltaVista was an early web search engine. It was once one of the most popular search engines, but it lost ground with the rise of Google and was purchased in 2003 by Yahoo!, which retained the brand but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On June 28, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it would be shutting down AltaVista on July 8, 2013.

E. Cuil

Cuil is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil said it has a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008.

F. Excite

Excite is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995. Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal showing news and weather etc. (outside USA only), a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources. Now an internet portal, it was once one of the most recognized brands on the internet. It was one of the famous 90”s dotcoms.

G. AOL Search

AOL Search Engine is a multinational mass media corporation based in New York City that develops, grows, and invests in brands and web sites. The company's business spans digital distribution of content, products, and services, which it offers to consumers, publishers, and advertisers.

H. Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.

I. GigaBlast

GigaBlast was developed by an ex-programmer from Infoseek. GigaBlast supports nested Boolean search logic using parenthesis and infix notation. A unique search engine, it indexes over 10 billion web pages.

J. Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet is a subsidiary of Amazon known more for providing website traffic information. The search engine was provided by Google, then Live Search, now in-house applications run their own search.

V. What is Electronic Mail or E-mail?

Electronic Mail or E-mail is a fast, economical and convenient way to send messages to family, friends and colleagues. It is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

A. How is sending/receiving e-mail done?

Sending and receiving messages is just a snap. Just follow these simple steps.

First, open your e-mail program and launch a new message window by clicking on the appropriate icon. Second, in the TO box, type the name of the recipient. Make sure you enter the address correctly or the message will return to you. You can send a message to more than one person by entering multiple addresses. Just put a semicolon (;) between each address. You can also send a copy (cc:) and a blind copy (Bcc:) to multiple addresses. Your return address is automatically sent to the recipient. Third, type the subject of the e-mail. Fourth, write your message in the message window. You can also copy text from a word processing program and paste it into the window. And lastly, click the Send icon or select Send from the File menu and off it goes.

Before you can receive an e-mail message you should first log onto your account. Your messages all sit on the server, waiting for you to come and retrieve them. You can choose whether to open each message, to delete it, or to store it. Within limits each server will typically allow you to keep several hundred e-mails, either read or unread, stored. If you have exceeded your storage limit, you will receive a message from the server administrator. At that time you will have to delete at least enough e-mails to get back within the storage limit.

Just as in sending a message, you should first log onto the server when you want to receive e-mail. If you are not familiar with how to do this, please click "Send e-mail message" at the bottom of this page and review those instructions. When you go to your account, you will find a list of messages in your

inbox. You will also be able to view one of those messages automatically. You do not have to open the message to view it. If you decide to open the message, double click on its From/Subject line (highlighted in blue above). This will actually open the message so you can either copy or reply to it. Your e-mail tells you who it is from, who else receives it, and the date and time that it was sent to you. In this case, we also see that the sender marked it as having High Importance. After you have received your e-mail, look at the top to see what options are available. You can reply, reply to all recipients, forward the message to someone else, print it, file it, or delete the message. As you can see, your e-mail account is a tremendous help, but it does take some management on your part.

B. How do we attach files through e-mail?

Here's how to e-mail documents, spreadsheets, photos or any other type of file. First, open your e-mail program, launch a new message window and compose your message. Second, click the attachment icon (the paper clip) or insert the file by selecting from the drop-down menu. Third, browse your hard drive or removable disks to locate the file you want to attach. Click it to highlight the name, and then click the Insert button. An icon or message should now appear indicating that the file has been attached. Finally, click the Send button and off it goes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books:

McFedries, Paul. Computers Simplified, 7th Edition. Indianapolis. Wiley Publishing, 2007 (Chapter 11: communicating Online, pg.174)McFedries, Paul. Teach Yourself Visually: Computers, 5th Edition. Indianapolis. Wiley Publishing, 2007 (Chapter 11: Introduction to Email, pg.232)Dayao, Joel, et al. Web Design. Philippines. Jemma, Inc., 2010 (Chapter 1: Basic Web Concepts, pg.1-4)Bell, Mark William. Build a Website for Free, 3rd Edition. Indianapolis. Pearson Education, 2013 (Introduction: Website Goals)Johnson, Kelleigh and Ruth Maran. Maran Illustrated Computers Guided Tour. United States of America. Maran Graphics Inc., 2005 (Chapter 11: Email and Instant Message, pg.264)

Online Sources:

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