The Dependability Of The Web Essay Research

The Dependability Of The Web Essay, Research Paper The Dependability of the Web by Nathan Redman A new age is upon us – the computer age. More specifically, the internet. There’s no doubt that the internet has changed how fast and the way we communicate and get information. The popularity of the net is rising at a considerable rate. Traffic, the number of people on the web, is four times what it was a year ago and every thirty seconds someone new logs on to the net to experience for themselves what everyone is talking about. Even Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, a company that really looks into the future in order to stay ahead of the competition, said the internet is one part of the computer business that he really underestimated. As one of the richest men in the world

I doubt if he makes too many mistakes. Nobody could have predicted that the internet would expand at this rate and that’s probably the reason why troubles are arising about the dependability of the web. As usage soars (some estimate there will be over eighty million users by the end of 1997) could the internet overload? Even though no one predicted the popularity of the net some are quick to foresee the downfall or doomsday of this fade. If you call it a fade. The demand continues to rise and is now so great that technological improvements are continually needed to handle the burden that’s been created from all of the people using the net. Their are many things that can lighten the load that’s been slowing down the internet. First, it needs to have a lot better organization

because with over seventy-five million web pages, and rising steadily fast, being able to pin-point the information you are trying to find is very difficult. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. When you use a search engine to find information on a certain topic the search can come back with thousands upon thousands of pages or sites. Sometimes with over fifty-thousand. Now you have the never ending task of looking through each site to find what you want. Plus, with links on most pages people can end up getting lost real fast and not being able to find their way back. Search engines should develop what I call the filter down affect. In the filter down affect a broad topic is chosen and then sub-topics are chosen continuously until the list of sites has narrowed the search

to respectable sites and the information needed. Having better organization would remove some of the worthless sites around cyperspace from ending up first in the search engines results. A second way to lighten the load of the internet is by improving the time it takes to load a page. The speed of loading a page depends greatly on the type of equipment, software, how much memory you have, your connection speed, plus a lot of other factors, but web page designers should make more text and less graphics, animation, and video because text takes a lot less time to load. According to an October 1996 survey by AT&T, sixty-seven percent of sites were ? off the net? for at least on hour per day because of overload. The web wasn’t designed to handle graphics, animation, audio, and

video. It was first developed for E-mail (electronic mail) and transferring text files, but web page designers want their pages to look the best so that people or for in the case of business, potential customers, visit their site and are impressed by it so they come back in the future and tell others about the site. After all, the best way to have people visit your web site is by word of mouth because it is very hard for people to find the site unless they happen to know the exact address. Sometimes though, popularity can kill a site. For instance, when the weather got bad in Minnesota one weekend the National Weather Service web site got overloaded with people wanting to read and see the current weather forecasts. The result was the server going down from the overload leaving