Fluency Milestone #4

In this past week I’ve learned a lot about HTML, something I knew nothing about previously, and searching for information on the web, something which I thought I knew a lot about but now realize I don’t.

I will start with HTML.  I think it’s amazing how much work really goes into the websites I look at daily.  I’ve been playing around with the source function under view in the toolbar to see how what I’m looking at online is actually written.  I don’t know that I’ll ever use HTML to design a website myself, but it is definitely interesting to see how it works.  Because I didn’t know a thing about HTML, the whole chapter in the Snyder book made me more fluent with technology.  At the very least I now understand the basics of it.

As far as searching the web goes, I thought I was an expert.  When I started to read this chapter, I thought to myself, how did Snyder write a whole chapter on searching for information?  What’s so hard about that? After I completed the chapter I realized why – it’s because there’s more to searching the web than just typing a word into the search box and sifting through the responses.  Here’s what I learned, although most of the information in this chapter will help me become a more efficient and effective searcher:

1.  The existance of the “Invisible Web”.  I thought that when I did a search for an item, every possible webpage relating to my subject of interest would be returned to me by the search engine.  I was surprised to learn that I was wrong, because according to Snyder “search engines crawl only a fraction (substantially less than half) of the Web”.

 2.  Page ranking.  I always wondered how it was determined what pages were returned to me in a search.  How was it decided which sites would be listed first, and which would be last?  Since I mainly use Google, it was interesting to me that they rank pages by counting the links to a page (Google calls them votes).  Snyder describes Google’s ranking system as “the more links there are to a page, the more relevant it must be”, and those are the sites that are listed first.  The book pointed out an interesting fact on Google’s system of page ranking – a “vote” for a site can come from those who are complaining about something in regards to the site.  Whether it’s positive or negative information, a vote for a site is a vote for a site.

3.  Using a minus sign in a search.  When you do search within results in Google, you can type the minus sign before the term you want to eliminate from the results to narrow your search.

4.  Checking to find out if a site is legitimate or not.  Snyder tells us to go to www.internic.net/whois.html which lists the company that assigned the site’s IP address (domain) to find out if a site is legitimate.  You can also go to the WhoIS Server site and type in the domain name or IP address, and you be be given the owner’s name and physical address.  Here’s the information that came up when I requested it from Internic on the University of Pittsburgh’s site, pitt.edu:

    Domain Name: PITT.EDU

Registrant:
   University of Pittsburgh
   600 Epsilon Drive
   Pittsburgh, PA 15238
   UNITED STATES

Administrative Contact:
   Jinx Walton
   Director
   Computing Services and Systems Development
   728 Cathedral of Learning
   Pittsburgh, PA 15260
   UNITED STATES
   (412) 624-6114
   jpw@pitt.edu

Technical Contact:
   CSSD NOC
   Network Operations Center
   University of Pittsburgh
   600 Epsilon Drive
   Pittsburgh, PA 15238
   UNITED STATES
   (412) 624-6714
   noc-networkengineers@exchange.cis.pitt.edu

Name Servers:
   NS4-QIP.NS.PITT.EDU      136.142.15.13
   NS5-QIP.NS.PITT.EDU      130.49.127.11

Domain record activated:    21-Jun-1989
Domain record last updated: 26-Jul-2006
Domain expires:             31-Jul-2007
The legitimacy of websites is important because you can’t always believe everything you read on the internet.  Making sure you’re getting information from a legitimate site is one of many ways to make sure that the information you are getting is from a trustworthy source.