Search Engine is the term given to the computer programs whose function is to look up the sites that have related information about the words the user enters in the search box. Examples of search engines are:

A search box is the box where the user inputs the word he is looking up for. Below is an image of the Yahoo! Search box.

Acronym for Universal Resource Locator. URL simply refers to the location of the web site a person is looking for. This is the set of words or the name, which often starts with the word http:// or the domain name which starts with www, and normally ends with the word .com, .edu, or .org (referred to as domain).

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The portion of the naming hierarchy tree (URL) that refers to general groupings of networks based on organization-type or geography. .edu refers to educational institution, .com refers to commercial establishments, while .org refers to organizations. Also, every country has its own domain extension (e.g. .ph for Philippine based URLs.

It is the name of a certain server connected to the World Wide Web. It is typed in this format: http://www.name.com

http:// - the protocol or communication standard used.

www – world wide web

name – the name of the web site

com – the organization-type (commercial)

. (dot) – serves as the separator

This is it. The interconnected computers whose goal is to provide better communication worldwide.

Hypertext Transmission Protocol – This is the standard by which data is transmitted over telephone lines, networking cables, and satellites. This is created so that different types of computers can communicate with each other without loss in data integrity or the information transmitted over the different networking mediums. This is normally typed in the location field of Netscape Navigator or in the address bar of Internet Explorer browsers before the domain name to view different web pages.

Since the Internet is created to meet the needs for fast, affordable, and more efficient communication medium, people are given the privilege to make them known through emails, chat, message boards, web pages, or even web sites or homepages.

Web Sites and homepages are almost the same in that both consist of a number of web pages or HTML pages. The probable difference would be the size of the whole Site. Homepages normally consist of few web pages whose contents consist of personal data or interests of the person who set up the Homepage. Web sites normally consist of many web pages, and links to file database. Normally, Sites that have commercial content or a wide array of information on certain subjects are considered web sites, not homepages. But whatever anybody thinks, these two are just synonymous to me.

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Location field is the term used to refer to the space where you type the URL in Netscape Navigator browsers. It is typically found three levels from the top of the browser window. Below is an image of what it looks like.

An address bar is the Internet Explorer’s version of where you type the URL. Its function is much the same as that of the Location field.

A Bookmark is just a shortcut address of the URL saved into your browser for faster access. Bookmarking refers to the process saving the URL of a certain web site into the browser’s shortcut menu. In Netscape Navigator browsers, Bookmark is also the term for this shortcut menu that contains these URLs.

The Favorites button in Internet Explorer browsers contains the shortcut URLs to bookmarked web sites. This is much the as the Bookmark button of Netscape Navigator browsers.

Internet Protocol address. Also referred to as the dot address, the IP address is the numerical counterpart of the domain name. Sometimes, instead of placing the domain name in the address bar or the location field, this is what is placed. This is in the form of four sets of numbers separated by three dots (i.e. 127.0.0.1).

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A browser or a web browser is a program used to view data from the Internet in your personal computer. This is what you are presently using to view this help page.

Web Pages are electronic pages that are formatted for viewing in web browsers. These are much like any non-electronic pages (as in magazines) but are made specifically for the World Wide Web. What you are reading right now is a web page.

Servers are the computers or set of computers whose task is to administer the transmission and reception of data in the Internet directed towards the company or organization owning the server. These computers often contain millions of data that are searched by millions of Internet users just like you. There are different types of servers depending on the tasks they are doing. Some of these are email servers (focused on managing email accounts), and FTP server (focuses on storing shareware or freeware data to be transmitted through FTP).

Downloading is the process of saving a file you got from the Internet into your local computer’s harddrive. Downloading sometimes takes a long time so some programmers created softwares that aid in downloading tasks. One of these is GetRight.

Uploading is the process of sending data from your computer to any other computer connected in the Internet.

GetRight is a downloading software which allows a download request to be resumed from the point where it stopped or disconnected at any time specified by the user. Normally when downloading using browsers’ default saving scheme, once a file is disconnected from downloading, resuming it requires that you restart from the beginning of your download. This is irritating especially if the downloading stopped a few Kilobytes before it is finished.

Chat is a "real-time" way for people connected to the Internet to communicate with each other.

Internet Relay Chat – This is real-time communication program that sends and receives typed messages in an alternated manner (sender then receiver). This works much like text messaging except that transmission and reception of data, as well as typing in of characters is much faster. Another is that there is a standard way of representing characters so there’s no problem whether both the sender and receiver have the same type of computer unit or not (unlike text messaging using cellular phones which need to have the same type of unit to be able to send and receive the same type of characters – this is true to our country, I am not sure of it is in other countries).

mIRC (Mirabilis Internet Relay Chat) is an IRC program that is most commonly used in many countries worldwide to chat with different types of people around the globe.

Email or electronic mail is another way of sending letters, this time, with the use of computers. This is more efficient because transmission time is faster locally or even internationally. Post mail usually takes not earlier than one day to reach its destination while email takes only a few minutes (unless the email server is down which is not likely to happen) to be transmitted.

JPEG is an image format used in transmission of electronic images so as to compress them into a format almost as clear as the original bitmap image yet up to one fourth its original bitmap byte size.

GIF is an image format that uses 8-bit color and efficiently compresses solid areas of color while preserving sharp detail, such as that in line art, logos, or illustrations with type. You also use the GIF format to create animated images or known as animated GIF.

Hypertext Mark-up Language – The standard language by which data, most specially texts, are sent over the Internet. This is implemented by using standardized text coding such as placements of greater than or less than signs known as HTML brackets ">" or "<", to contain chosen interpretable words known as tags.

An HTML Page is basically a web page. Web pages contain HTML tags that are interpreted by Internet browsers. These tags normally start with the tag and ends with the tag. In between these two tags are the head tag , the body tag , and other tags, attributes, and properties.