Picking your First Resources.

The first step to insuring a more productive life on the Information Superhighway is picking some resources and bookmarking them. In order to locate a particular resource on the Internet you will need to know its address. An address can be considered the location of a resource, and all items, including you, have an address if they are on the Internet. Just as you have an email address which is different from everyone else, so too, can there be sites within sites, resources within resources.

Each type of resource has a slightly different format address and name, but the three most common addresses you will have to deal with are EMAIL, FTP and WWW addresses.

An email address goes to a specific person. i.e.

Joan Q. Public@anysite.com

The FTP address usually addresses a system as a whole unit. i.e.

ftp.anysite.com

The WWW address is similar to an FTP address in as much as it reaches out to a system, but it also specifies exactly where on the system to go. i.e.

http://www.anysite.com/mypage.html

While the addresses for FTP sites and Email addresses are simply called "addresses", a WWW address is called a URL or Universal Resource Locator. For a more detailed description of the term URL, see our glossary.

There are numerous resources on the net which everybody needs from time to time. The big problem is knowing which resource you need. While everyone has certain specific needs, there are a few common resources which everyone should use.

The first type of resource you should pick concerns searching the Internet. Basically there are two types of Search Engines, Web Crawlers and Directories.

Web Crawlers. A Web Crawler (sometimes called a spider) is an automated search engine. When someone submits a resource(website) to the search engines it sends a small, but powerful program back to the site of the submission which scans the site for more resources. If it finds additional resources, it catalogs them as well as the original resource. The advantage of this is you can find information in a site, even if the site is not dedicated to that specific type of information. For example, locating information on Airplanes in a site about NASA space activities. The main drawback to this type of search engine is the tendency to catalog too much information.

A couple of examples of the best crawlers are;

HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com/)

Infoseek (http://ultra.infoseek.com/)

Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/)

Directories. Directories are the Yellow Pages of the Internet. They contain only that information which has been submitted to them. Here you will find vast listings of resources, but if the person submitting the information didn't include all of the description of his/her site, you may not find what you are looking for.

A couple of examples of Directories are;

YAHOO! (http://www.yahoo.com)

Linkstar (http://www.linkstar.com/)

InfoHiway (http://www.infohiway.com/way/index.aspl)

The directories may not be as up to date, but when you are looking for specific information, it's usually easier to try a directory first. If that fails to yield results, try one of the search engines.