Finding people

1
Finding people

• finger command
• finger user_at_hostname
• Finger command generally works on local network
• It may not work on other networks.
• You cannot finger username_at_wam.umd.edu from
  outside of wam.umd.edu.
• finger l gives more information.

2
Finding Site Owners

• Whois command used to find who owns a site.
• 2-step process
• Type whois hostname to find whois server
• Type whois h (whois server name) hostname
• Eg whois cnn.com
• Then whois h whois.networksolutions.com cnn.com

3
Whois 2

• Access .gov whois files differently
• http//www.nic.gov/whois.html
• Dont put the www in front of the domain.
• Other country domains
• www.nic.uk/whois.html -- United Kingdom
• www.nic.fr/whois.html -- France
• General site for country-specific domains
• http//world-whois.com

4
Lynx

• Text-based browser
• lynx www.umd.edu
• Up-down arrows scroll among links
• Left back, right forward
• Enter click on link
• Space pagedown, - pageup
• G go to another site
• Q quit

5
Lynx bookmarks

• Type a then d.
• That will save a bookmark.
• To use the bookmark, type v to view them and then
  select one.

6
Entry forms

• Let you enter data and send it to the server.
• Can be buttons, text, dropdowns, etc
• Can cycle through form elements using tab.
• Can hit enter or click on a certain send button
  to send this data.

7
Searching

• Use search engines to find webpages
• Start searches simple.
• Make them more specific only as necessary.
• Search engines have programs that search the web
  for pages and data.
• Not all data is webpages
• www.invisible-web.net

8
Searching

• Type some keywords into the space given.
• The search engine will look for pages with those
  keywords
• Some require ANDs between words, some dont
  (like google).
• The results will be displayed.

9
Displaying Search Results

• Generally the results appear as a list of links.
• There may be several pages of results.
• There may be short excerpts from the document.
• There may be a cache.
• There may be options to download.
• There may be other links or suggestions on the
  page.

10
Subject Indexes

• Example Yahoo
• Hierarchical menus that let you find the subject
  you want.
• Eg, Tennis elbow
• Health -Diseases -Sports -Tennis Elbow
• Search by idea rather than by exact phrases.

11
Meta searches

• Metacrawler searches other search engines for
  your query
• It waits a few seconds, then displays the top
  results from each
• Can be useful since different search engines use
  different methods for finding and categorizing
  pages.