Kenneth C. Laudon,Jane P. Laudon Management Information System 12th Edition pdf

uniform resource locator (URL)

. When typed into a

browser, a URL tells the browser software exactly where to look for the infor-

mation. For example, in the URL 

http://www.megacorp.com/content/fea-

tures/082610.html

, 

http

names the protocol used to display Web pages,

www.megacorp.com is the domain name, 

content/features

is the directory

path that identifies where on the domain Web server the page is stored, and

082610.html

is the document name and the name of the format it is in (it is an

HTML page).

W e b   S e r v e r s

A Web server is software for locating and managing stored Web pages. It locates

the Web pages requested by a user on the computer where they are stored and

delivers the Web pages to the user’s computer. Server applications usually run

on dedicated computers, although they can all reside on a single computer in

small organizations.

The most common Web server in use today is Apache HTTP Server, which

controls 54 percent of the market. Apache is an open source product that is free

of charge and can be downloaded from the Web. Microsoft Internet Information

Services is the second most commonly used Web server, with a 25 percent

market share.

S e a r c h i n g   f o r   I n f o r m a t i o n   o n   t h e   W e b  

No one knows for sure how many Web pages there really are. The surface Web

is the part of the Web that search engines visit and about which information is

recorded. For instance, Google visited about 100 billion pages in 2010, and this

reflects a large portion of the publicly accessible Web page population. But

there is a “deep Web” that contains an estimated 900 billion additional pages,

many of them proprietary (such as the pages of 

The Wall Street Journal Online

,

which cannot be visited without an access code) or that are stored in protected

corporate databases.