• WWW: An acronym standing for WORLD WIDE WEB. That was easy, right?
• Emoticons: There are a whole slew of them and they were invented to express emotions in postings. They are characters put together to symbolize sideways faces. Here are a few of the standard ones that you may see quite a bit at the chat rooms:

  Emoticon What it means :-) happy or friendly jester :) same as above except a mini smiley ;-) a friendly wink or just kidding around ;) same as above but a mini version :-| indifference :-/ hmmm thinking :-( sad face, unhappy :( mini sad face :-D laughing at you |-D something sure was funny because I'm really laughing hard >:-( I'm upset with you :-þ A razz. This is my favorite. I'm sticking my tongue out at you. I got something over on you but meant it as a fun kidding jester Curt's Creations Emoticon What it means :-) |<>>>>> I'm a happy white collar worker. See the shirt collar and tie? cU Going to get a drink. (cup with hot drink - hot java) .:D-| Let's celebrate. Celebrating with bubbly. See the fizz and the wine glass?

• ISP: Acronym for Internet Service Provider. A company that has electronic hardware and computer servers that make it possible for you to connect to the Internet, receive e-mail, and other Internet functions.
• Dial-up: An electronic connection where you use your computer to place a phone call to your ISP and receive your e-mail and surf the net. Some sources predict that dial-up services will be a think of the past in a few years. Perhaps that will be true in developed nations.
• E-mail: Easy one, electronic mail.
• Dedicated Line: A permanent dial-up connection where you are connect to an ISP and stay connected 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
• IP: Stands for Internet Protocol.
• Static IP Address: An address that is assigned to your computer that never changes. It's a series of numbers used to identify your computer and looks something like this: 185.182.12.4
• Dynamic IP Address: An address with numbers like the one in a static IP address that is assigned to your computer by your ISP's server so that other computer servers can find your computer when you are connected to the internet. This IP address changes because whatever IP address is available at the time you log on is the one that you get.
• SE: Acronym for Search Engine.
• Search Engine: A special web site where you can perform searches to find information. Search engines gather information by having people feed it URL's and it can crawl about the web gathering information too. Once the information is gathered by crawling (also called spidering) it indexes the information. Now before you ask me what a URL is, what crawling is, what spidering is, and what indexing is, I want to show you the other way to find information.
• Directory: This is the other way to find information. It's pretty much self explanatory. It's the simplest way to organize links to other sites so that you can find them. Directories are usually organized by topic and subtopics and alphabetized so that you can find the web site that you want to find.
• Portal: I had this question asked of me: “What is a portal? How does it differ from a directory or search engine?” The difference between the portal and the other 2 is this:

  A directory/search engine serves basically one function, to find what you are looking for. A portal, in addition to being able to find things, also provides other services like news, stock quotes, free email, online buying, and other web services. It's an all-purpose destination search engine or directory. Yahoo would be considered a portal because they provide maps, job listings, free email, shopping carts, and other online tools.

  All the major engines are called portals.

• URL: Acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. These are the links that you click on to go from page to page or location to location on the web.
• Crawling or Spidering: The process of following URLs on web pages to gather information on those web pages in order to index them.
• Indexing: The process that takes place after spidering the web pages. This is where pages are organized by keywords and keyword phrases and the information is stored on servers to later be used for searching out web sites and web pages.
• Keywords and Keyword Phrases: These are the words that you type into the search engines so that you can find web sites that match the descriptions of the words typed in. A keyword phrase is a set of words that are to be matched exactly as they are typed in and used to find pages that contain that very phrase. They are usually set off by using quotes: “keyword phrase to be found”. Phrases can better help you to pin point sources on a search engine.
• Domain Name: An address of a web site usually a word or group of words that are placed in the fashion of the following:

  Domain Name Domain type www.fordtrucks.com commercial www.madd.org organization www.webhosting.net network www.vacation.cc alternative domain type

  There are lots of other types of domains that designate where the web site resides or of what region the site targets like www.domain.co.uk (United Kingdom or England). The last set of letters after the www.domain. designates the type of domain it is. It is a United Kingdom domain signifying a regional domain.

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