30 minute overview of the internet and how to efficiently search it

1. What is the Internet
What:
How Big:
Who creates it:
How to use it: Use a search engine
and natural language and
specialized search language
Why:

2. What is the internet?
• A whole bunch of computers connected
together
• Files written in Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML) can be read on a
• Web browser using a Graphical User
Interface (GUI)
• So when you use the interface you are
really just looking at files stored on
another computer somewhere in the world

3. Some other terminology
• URL – universal resource locator
• DOI – document identifier
• index.html – main page or index page in a web file
directory
• Browser – the software that can display internet files
• Search engine – software that can search and index
files on the web
• Web bot, or bot – software that harvests information
from the web for search engines
• .edu .gov .edu .com – domains in a URL
• IP address – Internet Protocol, the network a
computer belongs to – a Princeton IP address

4. Two kinds of searches
1 You know what you are looking for.
“I have a DOI (Document Identifier), or URL
(Universal Resource Locator).”
1 You are looking for something but you
don’t know what you will find.
“I need information about _____.”

5. Tips for the first kind of
searching - URLs
• You don’t have to include http:// when searching, just use
the domain, ie. library.princeton.edu
• URLs have separate parts, the first part
– library.princeton.edu is called the domain
– Everything that comes after it, is really just file names in
a file structure. You can use this information to navigate
back to the larger website from a page you are on.
– smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/09/moms-apple-cake/
– By working backwards, the recipe for moms apple cake
is a file in the 09 folder, from the 2008 folder, in the blog
folder of the domain smittenkitchen.com

6. Tips for the second kind of
searching
• Google is constantly improving, so the
best palec to go to find out how to use
Google, is their own site
• www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/in
dex.html
• My favorites - exact phrase searching,
definition, spelling, searching Princeton
website, currency conversions. There are
lots – experiment!

7. What if something is no longer
there?
• The wayback machine!
• An internet archive – web.archive.org
• Go here to find web pages that have been
removed from the internet

8. A few more tips
• Use Google to find things on any site that
is badly organized or indexed
• If you have a bad citation, enter the title in
quotations, as a Google search, and you
may be able to find the correct citation
• Parts of the Internet have controlled
access, you may not be able to access
everything, depending on what domain
your computer is part of -