1. Information Retrieval and Web Design
Lecture (1)
Prepared by
Dr. Dunia Hamid Hameed

2. Introduction to the Internet
Internet, the network of networks, came about in the mid-1970s under the auspices of DARPA, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

3. Internet Protocol
Internet Protocol, which allowed several computers to communicate through a network, the Internet, formed by the interconnection of several networks.

4. In the mid-1980s, the United States National Science Foundation created a network called NSFNET, which became the backbone of the Internet in conjunction with similar networks created by NASA (NSINet) and the US DoE or Department of Energy (ESNET).

5. The mid-1990s saw the Internet boom and it was around this time that the number of private Internet access providers rocketed, allowing millions to connect to the Internet, which was coming to be known as the Net, overtaking all existing communication networks (Compuserve, FidoNet/BBS etc).

6. The WWW as an Internet service
The WWW (World Wide Web) or Web as it is informally known, has, together with , become the warhorse of the Internet. The Web has evolved from an immense "library" of static pages into a service offering access to multiple features and functions, an infinite number of services, programs, stores, etc.

7. A brief History of the WWW
In 1989, while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Tim Berners-Lee began to design a system for easy access to CERN's information

8. As originally proposed by Tim Berners- Lee, His suggestion was to organize the information used at that institution in a graph like structure where the nodes are documents describing objects, such as notes, articles, departments, or persons, and the links are relations among them, such as “depends on,” “is part of,” “refers to,” or “uses.”

9. A very important development of this idea was that the documents need not be stored at the same computer or database but rather, could be distributed over a network of computers.

10. The Web is now the largest, most open, most democratic publishing system in the world. From a publishers’ (web page developers’) standpoint, this is a great feature of the Web—any type of information can be distributed worldwide with no restriction on its content, and most important, using the developer’s own interpretation of the web page and link meaning.

11. From a web user’s point of view, however, this is the worst thing about the Web. To determine a document’s type the user has to read it all. The links simply refer to other documents, which means again that reading the entire set of linked documents is the only sure way to determine the document types or areas.

12. Web Search Technologies
The Web is the largest repository of knowledge in the world, so everyone is tempted to use it, and every time that one starts exploring the Web, he or she knows that the piece of information sought is “out there.”

13. Web Search Technologies
Developing web search technologies, now widely available through web search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and many others.
Other approaches have also been taken: Web pages have been manually edited and organized into topic directories.
Data mining techniques have been used to extract knowledge from the Web automatically.