This is a description of the various information formats available through the Internet including: HTML pages, mailing lists, newsgroup postings, bibliographic citations, definitions, etc.

The Internet is made up of "hosts and hosts" of data. This data is only turned into information after it has been organized and given some sort of value. Consequently, if you want to gleen any information from the Internet, then you have to locate data.

DEFINITIONS

Since there are many different formats of data you have to learn what tools to use to locate the data you need. The definitions below describe the various types of data found via the Internet search engines in next sections.

ASCII text files

As defined here, these are files encoded using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format. They may or may not have any structure, but they can be read by the vast majority of computers anywhere. Frequently, this is the format of files that are created locally and indexed using some sort of tool like WAIS or Verity's Search '97.

bibliographic citations

Frequently, these are pointers to books, journal articles, or other physical media containing information. The pointers usually include author(s), title(s), publisher name, a date, and pages. There are few standard ways this information is formatted, especially on the Internet and on fee-based services.

computer products

These are pieces of hardware and software, usually for purchase, whose primary purpose is to enhance the functionality of you computer.

current events

All types of news fit into the category of "current events." This content may include USENET news, and or the sorts of news published from wire services and broadcasting companies.

directories

Directories are mostly used to locate people, places, or services. They are ordered lists of information usually consisting of names, addresses, telephone numbers and descriptions.

email addresses

Similar to telephone numbers, email addresses are used to facilitate communication with one or more people or services via the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

full-text articles

Full-text articles are journal or magazine publications existing in digital form. This form may include a rudimentary ASCII representation of the publication, an image of the original publication, or a combination of both ASCII and image representations. These forms can usually be delivered to your desktop via a simple download or through some sort of document delivery service via your 'fax machine.

HTML files

HTML (hypertext markup) files are structured ASCII text files implementing a particular Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) document type definition (DTD). HTML files represent the vast majority of Internet content index by the Internet search engines. HTML files, when correctly and thoroughly structured, can not only communication a lot of information, but they can communication a lot of information about the information. Consequently, well-constructed HTML pages are easier to locate using Internet search engines since many Internet search engines take advantages of HTML's internal structure to create their indexes.

image files

These are digital graphics or pictures usually in the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) or JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format.

mailing lists

Mailing lists are one type of electronic bulletin boards for Internet. The other is USENET newsgroups. They are most often served via mailing list manager programs like ListProc, LISTSERV, ListSTAR, or Majordomo. The technology works by first submitting your email address to a database program. Another program then "listens" for new email and redirects it to every record in the database. This way people can share common problems, solutions, and interests via email. Some mailing list programs have the ability to archive the mail they receive. These archives are what may or may not be searchable through various Internet search engines.

news

News is much like current events except its content is generally less popular or trendy. News is more authoritative and contains less opinion than current events.

sounds

In this context, sounds are stimuli producing auditory sensation saved in a digital format. The most common format is AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format).

USENET newsgroup posting

USENET newsgroup postings are just like mailing list messages, except they are delivered to the end-user via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Because they are the posting of humans, they type of content they contain mirror human thought and interests. These are good places to find very "hot" topic or very timely information.