Getting around online
Author's note: Folks unfamiliar with the newspaper business often assume that because I write about the Internet I'm an expert on the subject. These same people also believe that playing a doctor on TV qualifies a person to endorse pain relievers.
The truth is, I get a lot of e-mail with questions that are beyond the scope of my expertise. I save the messages until my hard drive is full and then call on Dr. W. W. Web, professor of Netology.
Net Detours: Dr. Web, some of my readers spend over twenty hours a week on the Web, most of it waiting for pages to load. They want to know if faster connections, like cable modems, will solve their problems.
Dr. Web: The problems of someone who spends twenty hours a week on the web are beyond my expertise. Perhaps you've mistaken me for a doctor of psychiatry?
Net Detours: I think they want to know if more bandwidth will end the delays caused by the rapid growth of traffic on the Internet.
Dr. Web: I've never liked the whole Information Superhighway thing, but sometimes the analogy works. Did building the Poplar Street Bridge make commuting in St. Louis more pleasant? Of course not! Bigger and better highways don't speed up traffic, they create more of it. As soon as everyone has cable modems - or whatever the next miracle technology is - we won't just have home pages on the Web, we'll have home movies. And we'll still be waiting for things to load and hoping for faster connections.
Net Detours: Another problem created by the growth of the Web is that it's hard to find anything. What's the best search engine to use?
Dr. Web: First it was WebCrawler, then Alta Vista, next up looks to be Ultraseek. Everyone is racing to have the fastest search, the most sites indexed or the most features. But why settle for just one search engine when you can visit the search.com site and choose from hundreds? You'll be amazed how quickly you can find pages that take forever to download.
Net Detours: Speaking of searches, is there any way to know if someone creates a link to your page?
Dr. Web: Alta Vista lets you search for links to your page by typing "link:your URL" into the search form. Of course you should replace the words "your URL" with the address of your page when you do the actual search.
Net Detours: What about people who visit a page but don't link to it? How can you keep track of them?
Dr. Web: The folks at Web-Counter will provide the counter and the code for one of those nifty "speedometers" that tracks the number of visits to your page. Best of all, it's free. You can start the counter at any number you choose. So even if you don't get many visitors, you can start things out at 6,152 and still look popular.
Net Detours: If people are actually visiting a site, how often should it be updated to keep them coming back?
Dr. Web: The best sites seem to update or add pages almost daily. This might seem daunting, but you have to remember that time on the Web is like dog years. My best estimate is that one real month is equal to one Web year. If you like new cars, you trade in your old one once a year. On the Web, you update monthly if you want to keep up with the latest features.
Net Detours: Any other highway analogies before we close?
Dr. Web: Could you pull over? I think this is my exit.
