Information Technology Center

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW, W3 or Web) was invented in 1989 by an English computer scientist called Timothy Berners-Lee to enable information to be easily shared among teams of researchers.

This lecture focuses on:

  1. WWW what it is
  2. What Hypermedia is
  3. Web Portals
  4. Search Engines
  5. How Search Engines work

The world wide web is not the internet but rather it is only a part of the internet. The Web is made up of millions of webpages. Webpages consists of hypertext and hypermedia documents. Hypertext documents allow users to move easily from one document to another by clicking on hyperlinks. These links are usually underlined or highlighted by a web browser to identify them from regular text in the document.

What Hypermedia is

Hypermedia refers to documents that contain links to text, sound, music or video files. A computer that makes these documents available is called a web server.

Web Portals

These are websites that make it easy for web users to find information. The best known are www.yahoo.com www.msn.com and www.lycos.com . These sites publish daily news and up to the minute sporting information. They also offer free email accounts to the public.

Search Engines

The most efficient way to find information on the net is to use a search engine. Visit a search engine such as www.google.com or www.bing.com and enter a word or phrase and click the search button. A list of available sites will be made available to surfers.

How Search Engines Work

A program called a Web robot, Web Crawler, Web Wanderer or a spider automatically searches the web for sites and adds them to a database. This database is constantly updated for the best results.

Test Yourself

Choose the correct answer
Questions Options Verify
 1)  The Web is the same as the Internet True
False
 2)  The Web is only a part of the Internet True
False
 3)   Web portals like Yahoo make networking easy True
False
 4)  Timothy Berners-Lee created the Internet in 1989 True
False
 5)  A Web robot and a spider are the same True
False
 6)  Hypermedia documents can have links to video and music True
False

Assignment 1

Select a subject of interest to you. It could be on sports, entertainment, a hobby or any other area. Use a search engine to research the topic then write one paragraph about something new you learned. You are required to state the date you conducted the search, the search engine you used and the web address of the sites you visited.

Use an online word processor such as google docs. Choose a font-type and size that is easy to read. Save document in an assignment folder on your google drive and send a link to your instructor.

If you do not have access to google drive then create your document using Microsoft Word, save your document on a flash drive then attach your document to an email and send it to your instructor.