This is easier than the chicken or egg question. Which came first, the Internet or the World Wide Web (WWW)? For bonus points, which is larger? You’ll find the answers in the last paragraph.

Folks who don’t use the Web for much more than email and social networking (MySpace, Facebook) will find some how-tos, tips, and useful, informative, or just plain fun sites in this new monthly column. First, we’ll offer a tip on getting control of those millions of results you get when you Google.

Let’s say you want to do some cool surfing on a hot day, so you type surfing into Google. 49,500,000 results later, you’re more hot, tired, and dry than you’ve ever been before. What’s wrong with this picture?

Google may be a human invention, but it doesn’t think like a human. You need to tell it exactly what you’re looking for. Are you wanting to surf land, sea, sky, or the “everything’s on it” Web? Since you’re only a couple of hours away from the Blue Pacific, you may think it’s obvious (147,000,000 results for ocean surfing), but you’re also just a couple of hours away from snowy mountains (18,000,000 results for snow surfing) and close enough to touch the sky (8,800,000 results for sky surfing), and you’re already surfing the Web (11,200,000 results for Web surfing). Even telling Google what you want to surf doesn’t narrow your results much.

TIP: Use specific words and put phrases in quotation marks when you search.

Okay, “let’s go surfing now, everybody’s learning how, come on and safari with me” and the Beach Boys. We’ll narrow our Google search with specific words and phrases.
53,700,000 surfing “how to”
8,180,000 surfing “how to” California
45,700 surfing “how to” California “central coast”
1,870 surfing “how to” California “central coast” “beach boys”

Using more words is an obvious choice, but what about the quotation marks? They direct Google to search a specific phrase rather than a collection of words. Searching the two words, central coast, brings 46,600,000 results, but searching the phrase, “central coast,” narrows it down to 7,100,000.

Your homework for this month is to do your own Google search using specific words and phrases, with a goal of narrowing your search down to fewer than 100,000 results. What can I say—once a teacher, always a teacher! Happy Web surfing!

This answer to the Internet/WWW history is courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica Online’s academic edition. The Internet began being used in the U.S. in the 1970s, but it wasn’t generally accessible until the ‘90s when Tim Berners-Lee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) developed a new Internet application, the—tah-dah!—World Wide Web (WWW). Mosaic, based on Berners-Lee’s work, became the first browser. Mosaic morphed into Netscape, then Microsoft developed Internet Explorer based on Mosaic, bundled it on PCs, and—well, you know the rest of the story. (Those of us who started with Macintosh know there was life before Microsoft.) Q2: the Internet is bigger; Web browsers don’t access everything on the Internet. Really.

Mimi Collins, Ed.D. is the Director of Library/Learning Center
at Taft College. http://web.taftcollege.edu/library/library.shtml