The Internet: The Missing Manual

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The Internet, as you may have heard, is a parallel universe. It's a travel agency, bank teller, music store, video player, radio station, and newspaper wire service, not to mention a bulletin board, chat room, post office, and global chess tournament. Or at least the Internet can be all that stuff if you can connect to it. That can be the tricky part.

The basic components you need for Internet fun include:

Internet service. Lots of stuff on the Internet's free, but getting to the Internet usually isn't. In fact, you have to sign up for an account with somebody—your cable TV company, phone company, or an outfit like America Online—to get your computer connected.
Equipment. Your computer may already have what it takes to get you online: a modem (if you want to get online via phone lines), an Ethernet jack (to connect by network wire), or a wireless card (to connect wire lessly). Details in a moment.
Internet software. If you're going to send email and browse the World Wide Web, you need special programs to do so. Luckily, your computer came with these programs already on the hard drive.

This chapter explains each of these elements in more detail.

This chapter also describes each of the three primary methods people use to get their computers connected to the Internet these days, in this order:

Broadband connections. These are high-speed, extremely satisfying connections that are growing in popularity—but they're fairly expensive.
Dial-up connections. Your computer can also connect to the Internet by dialing out over ordinary phone lines. It's slow, but cheap.
Wireless connections. Pure heaven. Might even be free, if you're in the right place.

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A broadband connection delivers songs, videos, and digital photos to your computer in minutes instead of hours. We're talking at least 20 times faster than a dial-up modem. Complex Web pages that take almost a minute to appear in your browser with a standard modem will pop up almost immediately with a cable modem or DSL.

And that's not the only reason about half of all Internetters have signed up for broadband service. Here are some of the other perks:

No dialing. These connection methods hook you up to the Internet permanently, full time, so that you don't waste time connecting or disconnecting—ever. You're always online. There's no 40-second wait while your modem screeches and dials.
No weekends lost to setup. You can set up the equipment yourself to save a few bucks. But most people take the easy road: they allow a representative from the phone company or cable company to come to their home or office to install the modem and configure the Mac or PC to use it.
Possible savings. Cable modems and DSL services cost $30 to $40 a month. If you, a dial-up customer, have been paying for two phone lines just so you can talk and be online at the same time, you'll actually save money with broadband because you can cancel the second phone line.

Broadband connections usually come in the form of a cable modem or DSL box (digital subscriber line). (In some remote areas, you can also get broadband satellite service. But this method is slow, expensive, and rare in residential areas.)

As the name suggests, a cable modem (Figure 1-1) uses your cable-TV company's network of wires to pipe data into your house, right alongside Comedy Central and HBO. DSL, on the other hand, uses your existing telephone lines to carry its signal. You usually sign up for DSL service through your phone company.

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The least expensive way to get online is to use a narrowband or dial-up connection, in which your computer's modem calls your Internet provider's modem over the telephone line. You actually connect a piece of phone wire between your computer and the wall jack.

Sending Internet information over a phone wire is slow (for the geeks scoring at home, the top theoretical speed is about 53 kilobits per second). In today's Internet world of video, audio, and animated, glittering Web pages, this type of connection can be excruciatingly time consuming. You may lapse into a catatonic state waiting for a video clip to play in your Web browser.

On the bright side, a dial-up connection is inexpensive, doesn't require a lot of special hardware, and works just about anywhere you can find a phone. If you're just using the connection for email messages and light Web browsing, it's often perfectly fine.

Two kinds of dial-up services await you:

Online services. Services like America Online, Earthlink, PeoplePC, and Microsoft's MSN are handy if you travel a lot because these national services offer local dial-up numbers just about everywhere in the country. (That is, your laptop can make a local, inexpensive call from your hotel room or friend's house.)

These services are often easier to set up than standard Internet service providers (described next) because the starter CD walks you through the setup process.

To go online, open the related program (the AOL program, for example) from your Start menu. Type in your password and click the Sign On button that appears on the Welcome screen. If you use the Mac OS X edition of AOL's software, open the program by choosing Applications → AOL. Type in your password and click the Sign On button.

After a minute or so, during which your computer's modem connects with AOL's, you see AOL's dashboard of menus and graphics (Figure 1-5), with icons to click for checking mail or browsing the Web. Some services (AOL and MSN, for example) even offer specialized Web pages and other goodies just for subscribers; others provide free anti-virus and security software to their members.

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For years, getting onto the Internet meant plugging into it—that is, literally connecting a wire to your computer that, if you could crawl inside and follow it through all the walls, ceilings, pipes, and relay stations of the world, would eventually lead you to the Internet.

Nowadays, however, an increasing number of people get online without connecting any wires at all. Wireless hot spots, also known as WiFi or AirPort networks, are invisible pools of Internet signal, 300 feet across, that let wireless-equipped computers get onto the Internet at high speed. Travelers with wireless-ready laptops connect to the Internet via these wireless hot spots in airports, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and just about anywhere else they have work to do or time to kill.

Usually, you have to pay a fee to use one of these public hot spots. But if you live in an apartment building or other tightly spaced housing, an even better option may await you. You may be able to hop onto the Internet using someone else's wireless signal. Sometimes the signal bleeds into your home without the owner's knowledge, in which case—you very lucky person—you may be able to get online free, at least until the owner catches on. More often, though, someone in the building makes his signal available deliberately, collecting, say, $5 a month from each person who shares it.

If you're such a lucky neighbor, then it's not true that you need an ISP to get onto the Internet. Your neighbor has an ISP account, which he's sharing with you. In that case, you're getting online not via an ISP, but through a VSN—a Very Shrewd Neighbor.

But WiFi networks are also very useful at home. If your cable modem or DSL box is in an inconvenient area of the house, and you don't feel like snaking 50 feet of ugly network cable from the den to the bedroom, setting up a wireless network to share your broadband connection is just the ticket.

Setting up a wireless hot spot in your home is easy, at least compared with other networking tasks. Remember how you'd ordinarily connect your cable modem or DSL box directly to your computer? For a wireless network, you connect it instead to a $40 box called a

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The last piece of the Getting Online puzzle is the software. But here's the good news: Your computer probably has the essentials already installed: an email program, Web browser, and text-chat program, for example. And once you have those, getting anything else you need is a snap.

If you have a PC, check your Start menu for Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, the free email and Web programs Microsoft has included with every copy of Windows it's made in the past 10 years. If you're a Macintosh sort of person, open Mac OS X's Applications folder to see your free Apple Mail and Safari browser programs there waiting for you.

The rest of this book covers each software type in detail. But for your appetite-whetting pleasure, here's a summary of the key, free Internet software pieces and what kinds of happiness they'll bring you.

A Web browser program is your window to the World Wide Web: the Inter-net's vast collection of documents, pictures, videos, games, music, and other elements of the human experience. A browser lets you do just what it says: browse from page to page by pointing and clicking with your mouse.

As mentioned in the previous section, your computer has a Web browser already installed on it. Chapter 2 explains the alternatives, and it also explains how to use this browser thing to get around the Web.

An email program is like a cross between a word processor and an electronic postal worker. It lets you exchange typed messages with people around the world.

It also lets you store, sort, and save all the messages other people have sent to you. This means you can keep track of ongoing correspondences, file away electronic receipts of items you've purchased online, or collect all of the annoying junk mail that finds its way to your digital mailbox—and it will—and erase it all at once.

As you now know, your computer has a basic email program on it already. Chapter 14 describes how to use it—and why you might want to consider alternative programs, including Web-based mail programs that let you check your messages from any computer in the world.

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Because so many people consider the Internet such an important PC feature, Windows XP lets you fine-tune its dialing, modem, and Internet settings to within an inch of their lives. You should consider this section optional—or power-user—reading.

To adjust the settings for your modem's dialing patterns, choose Start → Control Panel. Click the "Show Classic view" link, and then double-click "Phone and Modem Options". The resulting dialog box (Figure 1-13, left) consists of three major tabs (Dialing Rules, Modems, and Advanced), each serving important functions.

The Dialing Rules tab (Figure 1-13, left) is made for travelers. As you move from place to place, you may wind up in locations that have very different dialing requirements. The area code may change, not to mention the requirement to dial 9 for an outside line, the availability of touch-tone dialing, and so on.

To set up the dialing rules for your current location, click its name and then click the Edit button. The New Location box appears (Figure 1-13, right), bristling with enough controls to make your modem sing, dance, and stand on its head.

Figure 1-13: Left: This dialog box has two priorities: To establish rules for dialing out, and to define as many different sets of rules for dialing as you need. If you're setting up dialing properties for a desktop computer, you won't need to change these settings after the first successful call.
Right: Setting up a new dialing rule.

Section 1.5.1.1: General tab

Here are the guidelines for filling out this dialog box:

Location name, Country/region, Area code. These boxes inform Windows where you're presently located. When your modem dials another city or country, Windows XP will know when to dial a 1 (and a country or area code, when necessary) before dialing.

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The Mac has its own assortment of Internet connection stunts, especially for the laptop crowd.

If you travel with a laptop, you know the drill. You're constantly opening up System Preferences → Network so that you can switch between Internet settings: Ethernet at the office, dial-up at home. Or maybe you simply visit the branch office from time to time, and you're getting tired of having to change the local access number for your ISP each time you leave home (and return home again).

The simple solution is the

→ Location submenu. As Figure 1-15 illustrates, all you have to do is tell it where you are. Mac OS X handles the details of switching to the correct Internet connection and phone number.

To create a location, which is nothing more than a set of memorized settings, open System Preferences, click Network, and choose New Location from the Location pop-up menu. You'll be asked to provide a name for your new location, such as Chicago Office or Dining Room Floor.

When you click OK, you return to the Network panel, which is now blank. Take this opportunity to set up the kind of Internet connection you use at the corresponding location, just as described on the first pages of this chapter. If you travel regularly, in fact, you can use Location Manager to build a long list of locations, each of which "knows" the local phone number for your Internet access company (because you've entered it on the PPP tab).

A key part of making a new location is putting the various Internet connection types (Ethernet, AirPort, Modem, Bluetooth) into the correct order. Your connections will be slightly quicker if you give the modem priority in your Hotel setup, the AirPort connection priority in your Starbucks setup, and so on.

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No doubt about it: the Web has transformed the world. From its humble beginnings as an information-sharing system for scientists and academics, the Web has rapidly developed since the early 1990s into a complex collection of sites and services that have changed the way people interact with each other.

It's safe to say the World Wide Web has something for everybody. It's a massive reference library, photo archive, software center, radio station, television network, music store, movie distribution system, and repository of such giddy weirdness as a page of dancing hamsters or a live video camera transmitting pictures of corn growing in Iowa. This chapter shows you how to set up your own personal window into this world: your Web browser.

Start up your computer, get on the Internet, and open up your Web browser program, like so:

If you're a Windows person, open your Start menu and click the name of your Web browser. Unless you've installed an alternative browser like Fire fox or Netscape, that probably means Internet Explorer because that's what comes with every version of Windows since the last century.
If you're a Macintosh maven, open your Applications folder and double click Safari, Apple's own Web-browsing software. If your Mac's really old, you may find the Mac version of Internet Explorer or Netscape on your computer instead of—or in addition to—Safari.
If you use America Online or a similar service, open the software bearing its name; it has a Web browser built in.

Even though AOL offers a built-in browser, you don't have to use it. If you prefer Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or some other browser, try this: First connect to the Internet using the custom AOL software. Then, once you're on and you hear the cheery voice say "Welcome!", you can open up Internet Explorer, Firefox, or any browser you like to use

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Start up your computer, get on the Internet, and open up your Web browser program, like so:

If you're a Windows person, open your Start menu and click the name of your Web browser. Unless you've installed an alternative browser like Fire fox or Netscape, that probably means Internet Explorer because that's what comes with every version of Windows since the last century.
If you're a Macintosh maven, open your Applications folder and double click Safari, Apple's own Web-browsing software. If your Mac's really old, you may find the Mac version of Internet Explorer or Netscape on your computer instead of—or in addition to—Safari.
If you use America Online or a similar service, open the software bearing its name; it has a Web browser built in.

Even though AOL offers a built-in browser, you don't have to use it. If you prefer Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or some other browser, try this: First connect to the Internet using the custom AOL software. Then, once you're on and you hear the cheery voice say "Welcome!", you can open up Internet Explorer, Firefox, or any browser you like to use on top of AOL's browser.

The first Web page you see is probably one chosen by Apple, Microsoft, AOL, or whoever provided your browser software. It doesn't matter, because you can easily jump to a new page or change your browser's startup page to be one of your own choosing (Section 2.3.3).

No matter what the Web page, you're bound to see some hyperlinks. Hyper-links—or links for short—are typically sprinkled throughout the text of a Web page as words or phrases that stand out against the regular text, because they're a different color, they're underlined, or both. Clicking a link immediately takes you to another Web page containing information about the words in the link you just clicked. Links are what make the Web

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As you may have gathered from this chapter already, the Web is huge. Filled with sites devoted to news, stocks, sports, games, movies, real estate, television, and more, it's hard to decide where to go first. It's like having a shopping list with dozens of things you need to buy, but every item is for sale in a completely different store and you have to drive all over town to get it all.

This is where a portal site comes in handy. As the name suggests, a portal site is an entryway into a larger world. Or, to stick with the analogy above, a good portal site is like an enormous shopping mall that houses just about all the stores that you could think of—and then some. (There isn't, however, a Corn Dog Hut franchise in this mall.)

A search box somewhere on the page is one feature all these portals have in common. These boxes are quite easy to use: Type in keywords related to the subject you seek, click the Search button, and wait to see what Web pages the search engine thinks best match your query. As Chapter 3 explains in greater detail, search engines are the way you find specific information in the Web's massive sprawl.

Portals are more than just search engines, though. This section gives you a guided tour of four of the big ones so you can decide if they'll be useful to you in your online travels.

Google is the Web's card catalog, the closest thing it's got to a master directory. Hundreds of millions of people a day use this simple, streamlined search box to find what they're looking for online.

Google started out as a Web-search company created by two Stanford University students. Although it's officially been around only since 1998, Google didn't take long to explode in popularity to become the Web's dominant search site.

With a well-stocked arsenal of ambition, skill, and venture capital money to fuel its projects, Google soon became much more than a search box—to see what lies behind that clean white façade, go to

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If you have a Windows-based computer, a copy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser is already on your hard drive. Likewise, if you've got yourself a Macintosh machine running the Mac OS X operating system, Apple's Safari browser is right there in your Applications folder.

These built-in browsers get you tooling around the Web with a minimum of fuss, but someday you may find yourself wanting, well, more. More security and flexibility in the case of Internet Explorer, or more sites that work with your browser in the case of Safari, which still encounters some Mac-browser bias here and there from certain Web sites that only display their pages properly for Windows browsers.

Lucky for you, there are plenty of other Web browsers to choose from. If you think you want to surf with new software, you merely have to point your current browser to the right download page, snag a copy of the new program, and install it on your computer. This section gives you a look at some of the other Web browsers worth a look.

Free, fast, and fun to customize, the Firefox browser has only been out since 2005 but has already been adopted by more than 10 million people—many of whom were rattled by Internet Explorer's vulnerably to malicious tampering. So what makes Firefox so great? For one thing, it can do just about everything Internet Explorer can do, and then adds these chocolate sprinkles on top:

Cross-platform. Firefox is available, in nearly identical versions, for both Windows and Macintosh.
Better security. Internet Explorer allows the use of little bits of code called ActiveX controls to run Web-based games and other interactive features, but Firefox doesn't. So when rogue programs or spyware (Chapter 21) try to install themselves on your machine through your Web browser, Firefox slams the door shut. After a flurry of IE-related security incidents, some experts even advised people who use Windows to ditch Explorer altogether and run with Firefox.

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Ever walk into a used bookstore? You know, the kind that has thousands of books jammed ceiling-high? The book you want is probably in there some-where—but good luck finding it. The Web's a little bit like that jumbled book-store—times a billion.

Enter the search engine. As mentioned back in Section 2.2, a search engine is a site that seeks out Web pages, using the words you type in as clues (like 1960 best actress Oscar or weather New Jersey).

This chapter takes a look at the Web's major search engines and explains how searching the Web is more than just typing in a couple of terms into Google and sifting through the first few entries on the results page. Finding gold, after all, goes a lot quicker when you know where to mine it. This chapter saves you the trouble of panning through 10 acres of dirt looking for the good stuff.

You'll also find tips on looking for information effectively, so you can find what you want and still have some time left over…to go read a book.

Using a search engine is pretty simple. For example, if you want to learn how to give haircuts to poodles in Pensacola, you can click in the search box at Google.com (for example), type in dog grooming schools in Pensacola, and hit Enter (or click Search).

The search engine's software jumps head-first into its index of the billions of Web pages it's catalogued, and then presents you with a ranked list of all the pages that it thinks best match your keywords. This search results page (Figure 3-1) contains brief descriptions of each site that matches your search, along with a link to click so you can go see the whole page yourself.

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Using a search engine is pretty simple. For example, if you want to learn how to give haircuts to poodles in Pensacola, you can click in the search box at Google.com (for example), type in dog grooming schools in Pensacola, and hit Enter (or click Search).

The search engine's software jumps head-first into its index of the billions of Web pages it's catalogued, and then presents you with a ranked list of all the pages that it thinks best match your keywords. This search results page (Figure 3-1) contains brief descriptions of each site that matches your search, along with a link to click so you can go see the whole page yourself.

Figure 3-1: A Google search results page. Like many other search engines, Google lists its paid results (more commonly known as "ads") on top and to the right of the main listings.

Many search engines have become household names, and the next three sections describe the major dogs in the search race: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Unless you're fresh off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you've probably heard of Google (www.google.com). Google made its mark in the late 1990s by doing one thing really, really well: teasing relevant search results from the morass of information on the Web. It got so popular—it's by far the most widely used search engine—it became a pop-culture verb ("He gave me his business card at the party, and I went home and Googled him").

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Search engines are fantastically good at finding exactly what you're looking for—if you know exactly what you're looking for.

Another approach is to window-shop—to browse. For this purpose, the Internet offers you Web directories: massive online catalogs that are edited, sorted, and organized by humans, for humans.

Instead of searching for specific terms, you browse by category. It's a slower process because you have to click your way down, subtopic by subtopic. But you can bask in the security that some person, somewhere, actually visited the sites and made sure they're relevant to the topic you're researching.

On the downside, handcrafted directories can never be as up to date as the ones that automated Web spiders generate on the fly, because it takes humans more time to sift through mountains of data and notice things like broken page links.

The three big directories are run by Google (http://directory.google.com), Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com), and the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Each starts out with a page of general topics, like Arts, Computers, Recreation, Science, and so forth. To start exploring, just choose a broad category to delve into.

Suppose you want to learn more about organic chemistry, but don't have a specific area of interest within that yet. Click the Science link on the directory's main page. (Figure 3-5 shows the Open Directory Project.) The next page lists all sorts of areas that fall under the heading of Science, like astronomy, biology, and chemistry.

Figure 3-5: From the Open Directory's main page, start by choosing the general topic you're interested in. Keep clicking deeper and deeper into the directory until you find the precise aspect of the subject that interests you.

Click the Chemistry link, and the next page shows you links to information about dozens of aspects of chemistry, including academic departments, conferences, and software. Next on the list are the many different types of chemistry, including Organic. Numbers in parentheses beside each link tell you how many links to further information there are if you click here. Click the Organic link, and several subtopics having to do with organic chemistry appear. Pick the one you want and click again.

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By now, you know how to conduct basic and advanced Web searches with the major search engines (and if you don't, read the previous chapter). But even advanced queries and precise keywords can't always help you find what you need to know. Suppose you need directions from your mother-in-law's house to the nearest Motel 6. Or a copy of Form 8283 to fill out for your tax preparation package. Or who's hiring people with a Master's in zoology.

For quests like these, start your search at a site that specializes in that type of information. This chapter's a compendium of sites that help you find people, businesses, maps, careers, health and government information, and more.

When you're at your computer, the Web can be faster than a telephone book. Plus, you can search the entire country, not just the area in the book the phone company dumps on your porch once a year.

To look someone up in an online directory, you need to know at least the person's last name, plus any other information you can supply, like first name, city, and state. For very common surnames, this additional information gets you more accurate results.

Here are the most popular people-finder sites:

Switchboard.com. Billing itself as Your Digital Directory, Switchboard.com (www.switchboard.com) lets you search for phone numbers and addresses.

You can also do a reverse lookup on the address if you know the phone number, look up area codes, and get maps and directions between two addresses.

Some sites let you remove your own entry from their listings. If seeing yourself listed in one of these sites gives you the creeps, look for a " phone book removal" link.
Yahoo People Search. This site (http://people.yahoo.com) helps you try to find a person's email address, as well as the usual phone number and postal address. Since no one's invented a completely comprehensive or accurate email directory yet, though, don't count on getting an up-to-date, working email address this way. But at least it's a start.

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When you're at your computer, the Web can be faster than a telephone book. Plus, you can search the entire country, not just the area in the book the phone company dumps on your porch once a year.

To look someone up in an online directory, you need to know at least the person's last name, plus any other information you can supply, like first name, city, and state. For very common surnames, this additional information gets you more accurate results.

Here are the most popular people-finder sites:

Switchboard.com. Billing itself as Your Digital Directory, Switchboard.com (www.switchboard.com) lets you search for phone numbers and addresses.

You can also do a reverse lookup on the address if you know the phone number, look up area codes, and get maps and directions between two addresses.

Some sites let you remove your own entry from their listings. If seeing yourself listed in one of these sites gives you the creeps, look for a " phone book removal" link.
Yahoo People Search. This site (http://people.yahoo.com) helps you try to find a person's email address, as well as the usual phone number and postal address. Since no one's invented a completely comprehensive or accurate email directory yet, though, don't count on getting an up-to-date, working email address this way. But at least it's a start.
Google. Along with all the other tricks up its sleeve, Google has its own phone book. You can get to it right from the regular search box at www.google.com. Simply type the person's name (and city and state if you know them)—for example, douglas smith 10024 or timothy ettlinger chagrin falls, oh—and hit Enter. Google lists all matching names on your results page, complete with links to maps of the address.

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It's easy enough to find the address of an individual or business on the Web, but you may also need help finding your way there. Most mapping sites are easy to use: Type a street address, and the site shows you a map pinpointing its location. Most maps let you zoom in for a closer look or zoom out to orient yourself in the surrounding area. You can even print the map out to take with you or email it to someone.

What if I want to find the address and phone number for a store, hotel, restaurant, or company? Is there a "yellow pages" version of the online phone book?

Yup. In fact, it's at www.yellowpages.com. Also, most of the online phone directories, notably Switchboard.com (Section 4.1), also let you look up businesses by name or category.

Another option is the Local Search feature offered on most major search sites. Google, Yahoo, and MSN, for example, offer links to local listings on their main pages. Using Local Search, you can quickly pinpoint addresses in a certain area, or even find amenities and businesses in an unfamiliar town.

For example, say you're on an away-game trip, looking for a good pizza joint near Wrigley Field. Hop onto Google Local, type pizza wrigley field Chicago, and hit Search. Google brings back a list of pizza restaurants in the area, complete with addresses, phone numbers, and locations marked on a map.

Finally, the mapping sites listed in Section 4.2 also help you find businesses by area. Instead of entering a street address, you can search for hotels, restaurants, airports, and so on.

If you need to not only find an address, but also get there from your current location, most sites also give you driving directions between the two points. Just type in the address you're starting from and the one where you want to end up. The site lists your turn-by-turn instructions and draws your route on a map.

Map sites aren't always 100-percent accurate; among other things, most don't account for current road construction, detours, rush hour, flash floods, or other factors that may cause you to vary your route. Still, their directions should get you there eventually and are almost always better than stopping 54 times to ask directions.

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There's a wealth of online information about medical conditions and all aspects of health and fitness. Healthcare sites can provide quick answers to your questions and support your at-home efforts to stay in tip-top shape.

These sites are especially good for getting background information before or after you see a doctor. (As disclaimers on all these sites tell you, never use information you read on the Web as your sole source in diagnosing a medical condition or prescribing treatment.)

For general healthcare information on the Web, you can explore one of these sites:

WebMD. WebMD (www.webmd.com) is one of the most comprehensive health-related sites. Here, you can research symptoms, read the latest medical news, and submit your own questions to experts. There's also a section of message boards and blogs where regular WebMD visitors exchange everything from advice to recipes.
MedicineNet. Run by a healthcare publishing company, www.medicinenet.com is known for its plain-English articles on a wide range of medical topics. Sections devoted to describing various procedures, guides to symptoms and illnesses, and a dictionary of medical terms are laid out for easy browsing.
Mayo Clinic. The world-famous Mayo Clinic has its own Web site (www.mayoclinic.com) with sections dispensing information about diseases and medical conditions, drugs and herbal supplements, and various treatments. There's also a section called Healthy Living with medical advice on just that.

While you're waiting on hold to ask your health insurance company a question, you could be finding the answer even faster online. Oxford, Medicare, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and other providers let you look up specific information about your plan, find a doctor or specialist, and see your coverage options online. Look for a URL on your member card or statement.

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For centuries, the local newspaper's Help Wanted section had a monopoly on the job listings market. And, in fact, your local newspaper's electronic classified ad section is still a good place to start. On sites like the Boston Globe's BostonWorks.com and the Seattle Times' NWjobs.com, you'll find the latest job listings and get much less ink on your fingers.

Scores of job hunters post their résumés on one of the huge sites devoted solely to job searching. Most career sites let you browse and search through job postings by field, salary, and geographical area. Many offer career advice, too.

These sites let you post your résumé in hopes that a prospective employer may browse through the listings. You're more likely to get an email from a recruiter (a.k.a. headhunter) than from someone who's actually doing the hiring. Still, recruiters can and do have connections to employers with active job openings.

CareerJournal.com. This site (www.careerjournal.com) from the folks at The Wall Street Journal caters to executives. If you're looking to move up in the business world, this site tells you what's out there and how to go about getting it.
Monster.com. If you're not happy in your present employment, the site's name may remind you of your boss. Monster (Figure 4-2) offers more than just an electronic job board where you can scan listings and post your résumé. It (www.monster.com) has loads of career advice, self-assessment tests, and articles. It also has a community section full of tips and stories from people in the same boat.
HotJobs. This site (http://hotjobs.yahoo.com) is the career-counselor corner of Yahoo world, with a searchable database of jobs around the country. It also has a Career Tools section where you can calculate how high a salary you need to ask for, find out what to expect in an interview, and so on.

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Quick—what movie won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1942? If you need fast facts to finish your homework, settle a bet, or bone up on game-show trivia, the Web is quicker than a trip to the library and cheaper than a bookstore spree.

You may be able to pull up the bit of information you need in a standard Web search. But when accuracy counts, you want a resource you can trust—like an encyclopedia. The Web contains many electronic encyclopedias for your reference needs, although some of the name-brand stalwarts like Encyclopæa Britannica charge a subscription fee to see every article available on the site.

If you're researching a topic very thoroughly and deeply, you may need to access published articles from thousands of sources. Services like Lexis-Nexis maintain databases of every newspaper and magazine article published in the last several decades, although you'll pay dearly for access to this miraculous storehouse of text. See the box below.

Many of these database and encyclopedia sites want me to sign up for a paid subscription. Is it worth it?

It depends on what you need the research for and how fast you need it. Reference sites designed for students and home users aren't horribly expensive, and most offer monthly payment plans or free trial periods. One of these may be just long enough to get the information you need.

Professional research databases, which contain millions of published articles from magazines and newspapers, court opinions, and legal briefs, can save you a ton of time. They can also cost hundreds of dollars a month, depending on how you use the service. These expensive databases are designed for business professionals who need accurate business, financial, and trend information—and whose companies foot the bill to download articles and reports. On the other hand, although it's primarily a subscription-based service, Lexis-Nexis (www.lexisnexis.com) also offers an à la carte plan that lets you purchase individual articles for as little as $3.

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What with email, blogging, and online chat, the Internet has created a resurgence of written communication. With more typing, however, comes more room for embarrassing errors in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.

The spell checkers built into many programs are handy, but they can't tell you whether you're using a word correctly or help you find the right word in the first place. If you need quick access to a dictionary or thesaurus while composing a memo, report, or letter, consider sites like these:

Dictionary.com. A dictionary that gathers definitions from other dictionaries and presents them all on the same page, Dictionary.com saves you a lot of thumbing through heavy, paper-based resources. Although peppered with advertisements, the site includes free guides to grammar, usage, and style (http://dictionary.reference.com).
Onelook.com. A search engine that specializes in finding words, OneLook (www.onelook.com) boasts five million different words in its index, collected from 900 different dictionaries around the Web. The site also features a Word of the Day. In a reverse lookup feature, you type in a description of something and OneLook tries to supply the word you're grasping for.
Thesaurus.com. If you want to avoid using the same words all the time, this site (http://thesaurus.reference.com) gives your vocabulary an instant boost. Like Roget's on steroids, Thesaurus.com brings back a whole screenful of alternatives.

If you want to improve your vocabulary while entertaining your eyes, try the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus at www.visualthesaurus.com. When you look up a word, Visual Thesaurus displays synonyms or other terms commonly associated with the original word. Built-in audio files even pronounce the words for you. The site lets you explore 145,000 English terms (and 115,00 different meanings) for $3 a month or $20 a year.

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If you're obsessed with the news, the Web is the place for you. No longer tied to newspaper publishing schedules or TV broadcast times, news on the Web melds the best attributes of print and broadcast journalism. You get (usually) thoughtful written analysis, combined with the immediacy of TV and radio; articles often appear on your screen within minutes of filing.

Furthermore, news-oriented Web sites deliver more than just text and pictures. Many sites include audio and video clips to enhance the main story. And you're not stuck reading them at your desktop computer: Almost all news sites now let you receive updates via handheld computer, cellphone, or email.

This chapter takes a look at the most popular mainstream sites for international and local news, sports, weather, and entertainment. But since news can pop up anywhere on the Web, these pages also give you the lowdown on the blogosphere—a kind of real-time, free-form, virtual op-ed page.

In recent years, Web portals like Google and Yahoo have entered the news biz. Their sites let you peruse headlines from hundreds of news organizations at once. Broadcasters like the BBC and CNN have also created Web sites, making text versions of their stories—along with photos, audio, and video—avail-able online. This section takes you on a tour of the major news Web sites so you'll know where to go for that blast of fresh news.

Google News (http://news.google.com) is a computer-generated page of news headlines culled from over 4,500 English-language news sites. It tracks the latest developments in world and national affairs, business, sports, science and technology, entertainment, and health. The page automatically updates itself every 15 minutes, so you see new headlines every time you go back.

Unlike Google's minimalist home page, Google News is positively bustling with headline links, story summaries, and pictures. The page is laid out on a two-column grid for easy reading, like a newspaper page. When you see a story you want to read in full, click the link to go to the full article.

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In recent years, Web portals like Google and Yahoo have entered the news biz. Their sites let you peruse headlines from hundreds of news organizations at once. Broadcasters like the BBC and CNN have also created Web sites, making text versions of their stories—along with photos, audio, and video—avail-able online. This section takes you on a tour of the major news Web sites so you'll know where to go for that blast of fresh news.

Google News (http://news.google.com) is a computer-generated page of news headlines culled from over 4,500 English-language news sites. It tracks the latest developments in world and national affairs, business, sports, science and technology, entertainment, and health. The page automatically updates itself every 15 minutes, so you see new headlines every time you go back.

Unlike Google's minimalist home page, Google News is positively bustling with headline links, story summaries, and pictures. The page is laid out on a two-column grid for easy reading, like a newspaper page. When you see a story you want to read in full, click the link to go to the full article.

As shown in Figure 5-1, a vertical navigation bar along the left side lets you jump to a page with all the top stories for each Google News category, which can be convenient if you want to skip the world-in-crisis stuff in the international section and go straight to Sports to check who went where on NFL Draft Day. Links at the bottom of each category's page let you show more or fewer articles in that area.

Figure 5-1: The Google News page brings the world to your screen in tiny bite-size chunks. There's a search box at the top the page so you can hunt for stories on topics you don't see on the main page. Just click the Search News button instead of "Search the Web."

You can also edit the categories even further, make and add your own areas, and arrange the page to suit your fancy. To do so, click the "Personalize this page" link, which you can see at right in Figure 5-1. To save your customized version and see it on any computer you use, you must create a free Google Account. (Look for a sign-in link at the very top of the page.)

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The world's major print newspapers have also launched online editions that you can browse for free. Many ask you to fill out a free registration form so the site can harvest a little demographic data for its advertisers. Other newspapers try to make a few bucks by charging for online articles, either by monthly subscription or per article. For example, a number of newspapers let you read breaking news for free, but make you pay for archived articles more than, say, a week old.

News sites like Google and Yahoo News frequently link to articles on newspaper sites. If you hit a for-pay site, use your Back button and try another link. You can usually find the same article for free from another paper's site.

The venerable New York Times—once nicknamed The Old Gray Lady—hit the Internet in 1996 with a burst of color. Still residing at www.nytimes.com , it's expanded in all sorts of directions, including podcasts, video and audio clips, and multimedia slideshows.

The Times is known for its deep international reporting, but its coverage of the cultural issues that are centered in New York City (mainly theater, opera, dance, art, and books), is also vast and wide. The online edition often includes many features not found in the print edition, like audio interviews between reporter and subject.

A special upper tier of the site called TimesSelect, which requires a $50 annual paid subscription (or free if you get home delivery of the actual paper), contains some members-only material. Certain columnists, for example, appear only in TimesSelect, and searching the Times's archives going back decades is free. But most of what's in the paper version of the New York Times is free on the Web for a week after publication.

Unlike the paper version, which only comes out once a day, the Web edition of the Times is updated constantly throughout the day—every 10 minutes or so—and you can sign up for daily email alerts and updates. Readers can participate in discussion forums, send messages to reporters, and email links or text from stories to friends.

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General news sites do a great job covering issues that affect the big picture—current events, stock market trends, and politics. But sooner or later everybody needs a break from the hard news. Check out the professional hockey scores, peek at the latest Hollywood gossip, or look up the local forecast so you can decide whether to pack an umbrella.

To keep up with the sporting life in all forms, you have plenty of choices. Most print publications like Sports Illustrated (www.si.com) and Sporting News (www.sportingnews.com) have overstuffed Web sites, as do the major sports television networks like EPSN (http://espn.go.com) and FOX Sports (http://msn.foxsports.com).

Looking for a place to commiserate with fellow fans? The Sports Fan site (www.sportsfan.com) provides group therapy and verbal sparring matches between fans. If you just want to wallow in All Things Sport, slip on over to The Sports Network (www.sportsnetwork.com), where jock-themed movies, books, and tech products are reviewed alongside a near-complete listing of scores, TV schedules, and news briefs on a huge variety of sporting events.

Of course, if you're obsessed with one sport above all others, go straight to the source. Most individual sports and leagues have their own official sites. In addition to bringing you the latest stats, scores, and schedules, official sites also have links to each team's site. You may also find player biographies and fan forums where you can post messages and banter with other fans. You can find things to buy, like tickets, team jerseys, and souvenirs.

Here are the sites for popular American major league sports:

The National Football League (www.nfl.com)
Major League Baseball (www.mlb.com)
The National Basketball Association (www.nba.com)

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If you want your news fast, furious, and highly opinionated, a Web log or blog may be just the thing to spice up your day. A blog is an online diary or journal posted on the Web for all t

Table of Contents

Section 1.5.1.1: General tab