Welcome to the Internet Dictionary. Currently, the dictionary contains mostly internet terms but general computer terms will soon be added. If you can't find what you are looking for in the dictionary, check out the links page, which has offers links to other internet dictionaries and glossaries. The links page also offers links to search engines and yellowpages.

One of the most common poorly understood terms is 'protocol'. There are a large number of these protocols in common use on the internet, so we list some of the most common ones here on the home page. For more details, see the main internet dictionary.

A protocol is basically a set of rules and instructions to enable computers to communicated with each other, even if the computers are running on completely different operating systems. You can perhaps think of it as a sort of secret handshake, where two people meet who don't know each other, but they are both members of the same club, and know the secret handshake.

Another commonly misunderstood term is 'search engine'. There are actually two main types of search engine. One uses automated searchers called robots, bots, crawlers, or spiders. Spiders crawl the web every 2 or 3 weeks searching for new web pages. The ones they find are added to their search engines index, which the search engine scours according to the keywords that the user has input. The other type is the Directory. Here, new web pages are added to the index or database by human beings. Directories tend to offer greater quality, but less quantity than spiders.