Everyday people access the web in search of anything and everything from the definition of “pretentious” to how to make a rocket. I use the internet on a daily basis, maybe even an hourly basis. I use it for searching up recipes, words, and for social media. I also use the internet for school and assignments. I honestly think I can say that my life is dependent on the Internet. The internet enables me to connect and interact with people, it gets me to where I need to go, it informs me about events going on around the world, and it tells me what products, places, or services are good or bad. It basically gives me all the information I don’t already know. I’ve never once asked myself how this all works and how I am receiving the information I am. There were multiple instances where I had no connection to the internet and was unable to do or search for what I wanted and times where I was searching for something on a search engine and I couldn’t find what I wanted. Of course, it was unfortunate and frustrating, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I moved on. Those were the only times I questioned the internet, but because I frequently use the internet and will continue to use it throughout my life, I think knowing how the web and internet works will be good.
The web contains mountains of information that becomes available to people in a matter of seconds, so how does this all work? A Universal Resource Locator (URL) is made up of a domain and subdomains. When we enter a URL into a browser, a request is sent to a name server, also known as Doman Name System (DNS). The name server’s job is to retrieves the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the domain. The IP address serves as a connection between the domain and the server. The server then sends back a response through Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which can contain data, images, or files. HTML gives data to the browser telling it only the structure, headings, paragraphs, and images but it doesn’t stylize it because that is the programming job of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). HTML gives the browser back data of what is in the website, while CSS gives the website personality with the style and look of the website. JavaScript is another programming language that the browser receives data on from the server for a website because JavaScript is used for all dynamic content on a website like tabs and overlays. This is what happens when we know what we are searching for and can type the URL into the browser, but how can we optimize our search for something if we don’t know what we are looking for?
There is a massive amount of information available as data is constantly being requested and received across servers as people search the web. With all this information and data available, to optimize a web search through a search engine, good searchers use brief descriptions for queries. They use precise words or minimize results by being concise. I am guilty of typing whole sentences in the search bars. Sometimes I would find what I wanted, but most of the time I had to rephrase or cut back some words, using only the key words. I guess I kind of learned from trial and error how to be a good searcher. Now, I usually only do key words or phrases. One interesting thing that good searchers do to optimize their web search is they use search operators like “site:” or “filetype:” to narrow down their searches to a certain website or file type. I never knew this was possible, but now that I know, I’ll make sure to use it more often. The internet is so vast and big that it’s important to understand how it works and how to use all the short cuts and tools you can to make your web searching as easy and seamless as possible.
The internet is our future. I believe that in 20 or 50 years from now, we will be immersed in technology that we cannot even begin to think or wrap our minds around right now. There will be new discoveries that we’d have thought were impossible. Things we will have to phantom will be so much that our way of life will have to evolve and adapt to how vast and quickly technology will be taking us. Because of this, the internet will be our best friend. Currently the internet is how main source of information. How we know what is currently happening in our community, town, state, country, and in the world, is relative to the news we receive from the internet. It is scary and daunting to put into words humanities dependency and need for the internet now, but it is the absolute truth. Children these days can’t even imagine what our times were like when we didn’t have internet, and what we had to do to keep ourselves entertained was play outside. Despite this scary fact, I believe that our dependency and curiosity and desire to improve and push the tech industry the way the internet works 20 or 50 years from now will enable us to achieve great things that we cannot even begin to imagine. Despite an unknown future, knowledge hasn’t hurt us so far, what we do with the knowledge we’ve gained is what matters.
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