Internet Resources

Overview The Internet abounds with resources varying from basic telephone-number lookup pages, to pages that allow you to download and play the newest video from your favorite band. Most sites are available for unlimited use, free of charge. More advanced or specialized sites charge for their services or allow you to purchase daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly subscriptions.  

Different types of Internet Resources In addition to the major categories provided below, there are some sites that serve as "meta-indexes" of Internet resources such as Internet.com and memory.loc.gov/learn/start/inres/index.html. There are even Internet resource newsletters that offer monthly updates of Internet resources for specific areas of interest.  

Web Portals These are sites that offer a wide assortment of Internet resources and services, typically e-mail, chat, search engines, and online shopping--all on the same site. Web portals originally provided Web access in addition to the services outlined above. Recently however, most Web portals, with the exception of AOL and MSN, do not provide Internet access and are generally search engine sites expanded to provide additional Web portal services. Many portal sites also offer free space for you to publish your own personal Web site. Below are just a few examples of the many Web portal sites available. 

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is the oldest as well as one of the most popular Web portals on the Internet. It provides a highly cataloged search engine, chat, instant messaging, e-mail, free space for personal Web sites, and an extensive shopping system. 

AOL (America Online), at www.aol.com, provides e-mail, Web access, shopping, chat, instant messaging, a search engine, and their own browser software. 

Excite (www.excite.com) provides a search engine, e-mail, custom-made personal pages, chat, online shopping, and classified ads. 

MSN (Microsoft Network), at www.msn.com, has instant messaging, chat, e-mail, a search engine, shopping, custom-made personal pages, and Internet access. 

Search Engines In addition to the sites mentioned in the Web portals section above, there are many search engines available to the public. Some search engines are known as "meta-search engines" as they send search requests out to multiple search engines on the Web. Some search sites offer to add your Web site to their index of searchable sites free of charge or for a small fee. Search engine sites often offer free "Web bots" that can be added to your own Web site. These bots allow you to perform searches directly from your Web site. Below are a few of the many search engines to be found on the Internet. 

Google (www.google.com) is a very popular and comprehensive search engine. It has a simple, easy-to-use design, a Google Web directory that categorizes results by topic, and an "I'm feeling lucky" button that provides you with just one result that is deemed to best match your search parameters. 

Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) is a meta-search engine that organizes search results from several popular search engines. 

Ask Jeeves, at www.ask.com, allows you to search using standard English questions, like "How can I find information about Internet resources?" The powerful search engine returns relevant sites and also provides a list of similar questions asked by other users.

Northern Light (www.northernlight.com/) is a unique search engine that categorizes search results into folders using their "Custom Search Folders" which narrow your search by topic. 

E-mail Many Web portal sites, as described above, offer free e-mail accounts that allow you to send, receive, and store e-mail with a fixed amount of storage space. Most portal sites also provide some sort of an address book to use in conjunction with their e-mail software. These e-mail accounts can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and your password. You can even forward e-mail sent to you at this account to another e-mail account. Listed below are a few of the many sites that offer free e-mail accounts. 

Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) is a part of MSN. It offers free e-mail accounts with an address book and forwarding options. Signing up for a Hotmail account allows you access to MSN telephony, instant messaging, and Web cam software.  

Excite (www.excite.com) provides a basic e-mail account with an address book and forwarding options. 

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) allows users 4 MB of storage space for their e-mail accounts, as well as their own instant messaging system. 

Gmail (mail.google.com/) offers a free e-mail account along with many other Web portal features including personal Web pages, a Web browser download, and search functions. 

E-commerce There are many e-commerce sites available on the Internet. Many manufacturers and distributors have extensive shopping pages on their Web sites. Additionally, there are Web sites specifically designed to do e-business with online shoppers. These sites range from online auction sites to giant “super stores”. 

Buy.com (www.buy.com) sells a large number of products such as computers, software, music, movies, and books. 

Shopping.com (www.shopping.com) has a multitude of items that are organized into categories from apparel and jewelry to entertainment and electronics.  

Shopping.yahoo.com (www.shopping.yahoo.com) is a complete online shopping mall with newsletters and sale specials updated weekly. 

e-Bay.com (www.ebay.com/) is an online auction site. Users can place bids on posted items. Payment is arranged directly with the seller. Additionally, users can also sell items to other e-Bay users.  

Chat/Instant Messaging/Internet Telephony/Web Cam Chat, instant messaging, Internet telephony, and the Web cam are all ways that people can communicate using Internet technologies. Chat features are commonly found at Web portal sites, as are instant messaging features that allow you to communicate on the Internet using Web cams, telephones, or by typing messages. 

MSN (www.msn.com) offers their MSN Messenger service to all MSN or Hotmail members. It allows members to send an instant message or to transfer files. With the addition of free downloads for their NetMeeting software, users can also take advantage of the Web cam and telephony features. Recently, there has been a trend towards integrating different chat and messaging technologies so that, for example, someone using MSN messaging can communicate with someone using Yahoo! Messenger. 

Yahoo!’s (www.yahoo.com) messenger service performs the same basic functions as those provided by MSN. An e-mail account with Yahoo! is all that is needed to access these services. 

AOL (www.aol.com) uses software for their instant messaging that is similar to the software used by both MSN and Yahoo! It contains the same features of chat, instant messaging, telephony and Web cam software. 

ICQ (web.icq.com/) is yet another company offering free downloads of their software that allows you access to both instant messaging and telephony. Chat and bulletin board features are also available free of charge. ICQ’s users recently topped 100,000,000 worldwide, making it the most widely utilized messaging and chat service available on the Internet. 

Newsgroups/Usenet Usenet is a worldwide public network where people with common interests can communicate their ideas, and provide information about a topic, using their computers. There are a vast number (some claim more than 80,000!) of categories called newsgroups where you can read and post messages on any subject matter. The Web site www.ibiblio.org/usenet-i/ is an information launch pad for Usenet. They provide FAQs, a newsgroup topic search, and Help documentation. These services, as well as software downloads, are also available at www.usenet.com/. Google "Groups" (groups.google.com/) is also a Usenet site with the popular Google newsgroup search feature and categorized topics.

Freeware/Shareware Downloads and Updates There are many Web sites that provide shareware and freeware indexes where users can download free software. Freeware is software given away free of charge, usually by the author. Shareware is software that is given away on an honors system. With shareware, an author typically requests that if you download and use the software, you pay them a small fee. Other shareware downloads are trial versions of commercial software with limits on the length of use and functionality. C-net (www.download.com/) is a very popular site that allows users to download software from a vast library of shareware programs. It provides a search function and a weekly newsletter as additional services. While a bit more commercial than C-net, http://downloads-zdnet.com provides the same type of services. For Web sites that provide download services to users seeking freeware and shareware, visit www.freewarehome.com/ and www.shareware.com/. Both of these sites have a searchable index of programs available for unlimited use, free of charge. 

Broadcasting Through the use of streaming technologies and the appropriate media player software, individuals and companies can broadcast data live across the Internet. Users have free access to such things as music, sports, talk shows, and video broadcasts, just to name a few. The site LAUNCHcast is a part of Yahoo! and contains a wide variety of Web broadcasts all categorized by topic. Many media player programs include broadcast features right in the player itself. For example, www.musicmatch.com/home/ offers a free download of their "Musicmatch" player that has broadcasting features built right into it. 

P2P P2P (Peer to Peer) is an Internet resource, which provides secure data, chat, and file transfer resources between two remote computers. Usually, both the client and server software are running on each machine to exchange data while Napster (for example) has a centralized server that indexes and manages all files available.  

Napster (www.napster.com) was the controversial P2P technology that used a master server to index and search for specified files. Napster was mainly used to share music files (MP3s) between users. Due to copyright disputes regarding the centrally managed system, Napster became a battlefield for copyright differences.  A new crop of P2P music trading technologies such as LimeWire (www.limewire.com) and KaZaa (www.kazaa.com) have gained widespread use, virtually replacing Napster.

Gnutella/Bearshare (www.gnutelliums.com/ and www.bearshare.com/) These sites provide P2P file sharing using a large community of users and computers for file exchange. There is no central indexing server and little or no restriction on what type of files can be exchanged. Recently, a new member of the file share community, eMule,  has emerged to replace the once popular eDonkey2000. eMule has become one of the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks around the world today.  It is  an open source project that is noted for its many upgrades, efficiency,  and attractive GUI.