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The World Factbook: World Wide Web
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The major advantage of the World Wide Web over other Internet services is its ease of use. You move from place to place around the Internet by clicking on pieces of highlighted text. You can do ftp, telnet, gopher, newsgroups and email from within a Web browser. The graphical web browsers ... allow the ability to see graphics, view movies, and listen to audio clips while online. The Web has almost become synonymous with the Internet, having all but cancelled out telnet, gopher and ftp.
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"A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars. " From Internet Archive Forum
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People were doing research on the Internet long before the advent of the World Wide Web by using telnet, ftp, gopher, and WAIS Internet tools. Although many of the sites that used these tools (particularly gopher) are no longer being actively maintained, these traditional Internet tools still contain valuable information and can be accessed using stand-alone software programs or via the WWW. For instance, a search in AltaVista for URLs with gopher in them (URL:gopher), had 65,010 results in September, 2001. Many of the hits were for older documents, archives for sites now being maintained on the Web. Although you may not find a reason to directly use any of these search tools or sites, you may run across them while searching the web, so it makes sense to learn a little about them, or know where to find them and how to use them. Netlink server at Washington and Lee University (W&L).
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