Flaming
Avoid personal attacks or you will be “flamed” by one or more people. A flame is a particularly nasty personal attack on somebody for something he or she has written. It is usually a little hysterical. Don’t flame; it is a waste of bandwidth and politeness shouldn’t cost anything. There are plenty of articles on “Netiquette” on the web (yes, the Net has it’s style police as well).
What can I use newsgroups for?
Newsgroups are an excellent way to find out good web sites to visit in your particular area of interest or just pick up detailed information about your area of interest.
You can buy and sell stuff. People often advertise things for sale in some newsgroups.
Gauge public opinion or strength of feeling about certain topics or interest
Find out detailed information that the mainstream media tend to over simplify
Task 1. After reading the text answer the questions:
1. What’s a newsgroup?
2. Who can send a message on a newsgroup?
3. Do all ISPs provide access to every newsgroup?
4. How many newsgroups are there? What topics do they cover?
5. What information can you find there?
6. What do you need to have access to a newsgroup?
7. What’s the organization of newsgroups?
8. How do we call a message on a newsgroup?
9. What is a thread?
10. What is “lurking”?
11. What is a flame?
12. What for do we use newsgroups?
Task 2. You can exchange views on almost any subject by joining an Internet newsgroup. Which of these groups would interest the following people (1-6)?
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Unit 5. Search Engines
Reading
How do Search Engines Work?
Exactly what is a search engine? Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.
Search Engines for the general web do not really search the World Wide Web directly. Each one searches a database of the full text of web pages automatically havested from the billions of web pages out there residing on servers. When you search the web using a search engine, you are always searching a somewhat stale copy of the real web page. When you click on links provided in a search engine’s search results, you retrieve from the server the current version of the page.
Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs called spiders. These “crawl” the web, finding pages for potential inclusion by following the links in the pages they already have in their database (i.e., already “know about”). They cannot think or type a URL or use judgment to “decide” to go look something up and see what's on the web about it. (Computers are getting more sophisticated all the time, but they are still brainless.)
If a web page is never linked to in any other page, search engine spiders cannot find it. The only way a brand new page – one that no other page has ever linked to – can get into a search engine is for its URL to be sent by some human to the search engine companies as a request that the new page be included. All search engine companies offer ways to do this.
After spiders find pages, they pass them on to another computer program for “indexing”. This program identifies the text, links, and other content in the page and stores it in the search engine database's files so that the database can be searched by keyword and whatever more advanced approaches are offered, and the page will be found if your search matches its content.
Many web pages are excluded from most search engines by policy. The contents of most of the searchable databases mounted on the web, such as library catalogs and article databases, are excluded because search engine spiders cannot access them. All this material is referred to as the “Invisible Web” – what you don't see in search engine results.
Searching with Yahoo
Yahoo, which was started approximately a decade ago at Stanford University by two graduate students, now ranks as one of the most popular Web search engines. You can search in Yahoo using either of two methods. You can search a categorized list of Web pages organized under 14 major categories, or you can enter a search query. Those methods are covered in detail in the following sections.
Searching by Category
Because Yahoo already has a long list of Web pages organized by category, you can search Yahoo by stepping through links along the established categories and subcategories. Here are the Yahoo categories:
Arts News and Media
Business and Economy Recreation and Sports
Computers and Internet Reference
Education Regional
Entertainment Science
Government Social Science
Health Society and Culture
Alta Vista
Most of the major search engines conduct searches by keyword, which by the way, Yahoo is also capable of doing, but AltaVista also allows you to modify your search parameters using its advanced search options. Using it’s search syntax, you can combine words to either expand or narrow your search. For example, suppose I want to search for eclipses, but I only want solar eclipses and not lunar eclipses. I could conduct a search using eclipses AND NOT lunar and my search would only give me a list of pages pertaining to solar eclipses.
Google has one of the largest databases of Web pages, including many other types of web documents (blog posts, wiki pages, group discussion threads and document formats (e.g., PDFs, Word or Excel documents, PowerPoints). Despite the presence of all these formats, Google’s popularity ranking often makes pages worth looking at rise near the top of search results. Google currently is the winning web search engine and so people need to learn to use it really well. Google alone not always sufficient, however. Less than half the searchable Web is fully searchable in Google. Overlap studies show that more than 80% of the pages in a major search engine's database exist only in that database. Getting a “second opinion” is therefore often worth your time. For this purpose, it’s better to use Ask.com or Yahoo! Search.
Task 1. Retell the text