Web search engine "Search engine" redirects here. For other uses, see Search engine (disambiguation).

In practical implementation, protocol stacks are often divided into three major sections: media, transport, and applications. A particularoperating system or platform will often have two welldefined software interfaces: one between the media and transport layers, and one between the transport layers and applications. The media-to-transport interface defines how transport protocol software makes use of particular media and hardware types ("card drivers"). For example, this interface level would define how TCP/IP transport software would talk

The three most widely used web search engines and their approximate share as of late 2010.[1] A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Weband FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. Protocol stack From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The protocol stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite. The terms are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, the suite is the definition of the protocols, and the stack is the software implementation of them.[1] Individual protocols within a suite are often designed with a single purpose in mind. This modularization makes design and evaluation easier. Because each protocol module usually communicates with two others, they are commonly imagined as layers in a stack of protocols. The lowest protocol always deals with "low-level", physical interaction of the hardware. Every higher layer adds more features. User applications usually deal only with the topmost layers (see also OSI model)[2].

to Ethernet hardware. Examples of these interfaces include ODI and NDIS in the Microsoft Windows and DOS environment. The application-to-transport interface defines how application programs make use of the transport layers. For example, this interface level would define how a web browser program would talk to TCP/IP transport software. Examples of these interfaces include Berkeley sockets and System V STREAMS in the Unix world, and Winsock in the Microsoft world. [edit]General protocol suite description

T~~~T [A] [B]_____[C]

Imagine three computers: A, B, and C. A and B both have radio equipment, and can communicate via the airwaves using a suitable network protocol (such as IEEE 802.11.) B and C are connected via a cable, using it to exchange data (again, with the help of a protocol, for example Ethernet). However, neither of these two protocols will be able to transport information from A to C, because these computers are conceptually on different networks. One, therefore, needs an inter-network protocol to "connect" them. One could combine the two protocols to form a powerful third, mastering both cable and wireless transmission, but a different super-protocol would be needed for each possible combination of protocols. It is easier to leave the base protocols alone, and

design a protocol that can work on top of any of them (the Internet Protocol is an example.) This will make two stacks of two protocols each. The inter-network protocol will communicate with each of the base protocol in their simpler language; the base protocols will not talk directly to each other. A request on computer A to send a chunk of data to C is taken by the upper protocol, which (through whatever means) knows that C is reachable through B. It, therefore, instructs the wireless protocol to transmit the data packet to B. On this computer, the lower layer handlers will pass the packet up to the inter-network protocol, which, on recognizing that B is not the final destination, will again invoke lower-level functions. This time, the cable protocol is used to send the data to C. There, the received packet is again passed to the upper protocol, which (with C being the destination) will pass it on to a higher protocol or application on C. Often an even higherlevel protocol will sit on top, and incur further processing. An example protocol stack and the corresponding layers: World Wide Web Consortium From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "WWWC" redirects here. For the radio station, see WWWC (AM). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide World Wide Web Consortium Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee,[2] the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 18 February 2011, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has 322 members.[1] W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum Web portal Abbreviation W3C From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a Motto Leading the Web to Its Full Potential... point of access to information on the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Formation October 1994 Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, Website w3.org Staff 62 Director Tim Berners-Lee Membership 322 member organizations[1] Region served Worldwide Location MIT/CSAIL in USA, ERCIM in France, Keio University in Japan and many other offices around the world Purpose/focus Developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. Type Standards organization

information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Examples of public web portals are AOL, Excite, iGoogle, MSN, Netvibes, and Yahoo!. Types of portals

Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Information or content that you are putting on the internet may create a portal in the sense of a path to new knowledge and/or capabilities. [edit]News portals

[edit]Horizontal vs. vertical portal (Vortals) Two broad categorizations of portals are horizontal portals, which cover many areas, and vertical portals, which are focused on one functional area. Another definition for a horizontal portal is, that it is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors.[1] A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.[2] [edit]Vertical information portal A vertical information portal (VIP) is a specialized entry point to a specific marketplace and or industry niche. VIP's provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. Separate from traditional vertical portals, VIP's provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging. [edit]Types [edit]Personal portals A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants(PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phones.

The traditional media rooms all around the world are fast adapting to the new age technologies. This marks the beginning of news portals by media houses across the globe. This new media channels give them the opportunity to reach the viewers in a shorter span of time than their print media counter parts. [edit]Government web portals At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the Governments as well as portals developed for specific audiences. Examples of Government web portals include;    australia.gov.au for Australia. Bangladesh.gov.bd for Bangladesh. USA.gov for the United States (in English) & GobiernoUSA.gov (in Spanish).  Disability.gov for citizens with disabilities in the United States.  Directgov for citizens & businesslink.gov.uk for businesses in the United Kingdom.   india.gov.in for India. Europa (web portal) links to all EU agencies and institutions in addition to press releases and audiovisual content from press conferences.  Health-EU portal gathers all relevant health topics from across Europe.  National Resource Directory links to resources for United States Service Members, Veterans and their families (NRD.gov).

[edit]Corporate web portals Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet. Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on. JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions. The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.[citation needed] With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows. Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees selfservice opportunities.

[edit]Stock portals Also known as stock-share portals, stock market portals or stock exchange portals are Web-based applications that facilitates the process of informing the share-holders with substantial online data such as the latest price, ask/bids, the latest News, reports and announcements. Some stock portals use online gateways through a central depository system (CDS) for the visitors to buy or sell their shares or manage theirportfolio. [edit]Health & Medical Web Portal Health & medical portal is the biggest place where display health & medical related information around the world.  Emedicalpoint Biggest Health & Medical web Portal in Bangladesh. [edit]Search portals Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. [edit]Tender's portals Tender's portals stands for a gateway to search/modify/submit/archive data on tenders and professional processing of continuous online tenders. With a tender portal the complete tendering process submitting of proposals, assessment, administrationare done on the web. Electronic or online tendering is just carrying out the same traditional tendering process in an electronic form, using the Internet. Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following:      Receive notification of the tenders. Receive tender documents online. Fill out the forms online. Submit proposals and documents. Submit bids online.

[edit]Hosted web portals Hosted web portals gained popularity a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such asHyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals. Emerging new classes of internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service oriented architecture, web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". e.g.: Nubifer.com's Cloud Portal. [edit]Domain-specific portals A number of portals have come about that are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services, a prime example of this trend would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agents, removal firm, and solicitorsthat offer conveyancing. Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials specific portal: IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal [edit]Engineering aspects

functionality to the user, the portal server is in reality the front piece of a server configuration that includes some connectivity to the application server. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one example of how a portal can be used to deliver application server content and functionality. The application server or architecture performs the actual functions of the application. This application server is in turn connected to database servers, and may be part of a clustered server environment. Highcapacity portal configurations may include load balancing equipment. SOAP, an xml-based protocol, may be used for servers to communicate within this architecture. The server hosting the portal may only be a "pass through" for the user. By use of portlets, application functionality can be presented in any number of portal pages. For the most part, this architecture is transparent to the user. In such a scheme, security and capacity can be important features, and administrators need to ensure that only an authorized visitor or user can generate requests to the application server. If administration does not ensure this aspect, then the portal may inadvertently present vulnerabilities to various types of attacks. [see also articles on SOAP and SOA] In telecommunications, the term protocol data unit (PDU) has the following meanings: 1. Information that is delivered as a unit among peer entities of a network and that may contain control information, address information, or data. 2. In a layered system, a unit of data which is specified in a protocol of a given layer and which consists of protocol-control informationand possibly user data of that layer. For example: Bridge PDU or iSCSI PDU[1] PDUs are relevant in relation to each of the first 4 layers of the OSI model as follows: 1. The Layer 1 (Physical Layer) PDU is the bit

The main concept is to present the user with a single web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers. For portals that present application

2. The Layer 2 (Data Link Layer) PDU is the frame 3. The Layer 3 (Network Layer) PDU is the packet

4. The Layer 4 (Transport Layer) PDU is the segment (e.g. TCP segment) (Layer 5 and above are referred to as data.) Given a context pertaining to a specific layer, PDU is sometimes used as a synonym for its representation at that layer. Packet-switched data networks In the context of packet-switched data networks, a protocol data unit (PDU) is best understood in relation to a service data unit (SDU). The features or services of the network are implemented in distinct "layers". For example, sending ones and zeros across a wire, fiber, etc. is done by the physical layer, organizing the ones and zeros into chunks of data and getting them safely to the right place on the wire is done by the data link layer, passing data chunks over multiple connected networks is done by the network layer and delivery of the data to the right software application at the destination is done by the transport layer. Between the layers (and between the application and the top-most layer), the layers pass service data units across the interfaces. The application or higher layer understands the structure of the data in the SDU, but the lower layer at the interface does not; it treats it as payload, undertaking to get it to the same interface at the destination. In order to do this, the protocol layer will add to the SDU certain data it needs to perform its function. For example, it might add a port number to identify the application, a network address to help with routing, a code to identify the type of data in the packet and error-checking information. All this additional information, plus the original service data unit from the higher layer, constitutes the protocol data unit at this layer. The significance of this is that the PDU is the structured information that is passed to a matching protocol layer further along on the data's journey that allows the layer to deliver its intended function or service. The matching layer, or "peer", decodes the data to extract the original service data unit, decide if it is errorfree and where to send it next, etc. Unless we have already arrived at the lowest (physical) layer, the PDU is passed to the peer using services of the next lower layer in the protocol "stack". When the PDU passes over the interface from the layer

that constructed it to the layer that merely delivers it (and therefore does not understand its internal structure), it becomes a service data unit to that layer. The addition of addressing and control information (which is called encapsulation) to an SDU to form a PDU and the passing of that PDU to the next lower layer as an SDU repeats until the lowest layer is reached and the data passes over some medium as a physical signal.

MAC layer PDU becomes physical layer SDU The above process can be likened to the mail system in which a letter (SDU) is placed in an envelope on which is written an address (addressing and control information) making it a PDU. The sending post office might look only at the post code and place the letter in a mail bag so that the address on the envelope can no longer be seen, making it now an SDU. The mail bag is labelled with the destination post code and so becomes a PDU, until it is combined with other bags in a crate, when it is now an SDU, and the crate is labelled with the region to which all the bags are to be sent, making the crate a PDU. When the crate reaches the destination matching its label, it is opened and the bags (SDUs) removed only to become PDUs when someone reads the code of the destination post office. The letters themselves are SDUs when the bags are opened but become PDUs when the address is read for final delivery. When the addressee finally opens the envelope, the top-level SDU, the letter itself, emerges. Radio waves From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light. Like all other electromagnetic waves, they

travel at the speed of light. Naturally-occurring radio waves are made by lightning, or by astronomical objects. Artificiallygenerated radio waves are used for fixed and mobile radio communication, broadcasting, radar and other navigation systems, satellite communication, computer networks and innumerable other applications. Different frequencies of radio waves have different propagation characteristics in the Earth's atmosphere; long waves may cover a part of the Earth very consistently, shorter waves can reflect off the ionosphere and travel around the world, and much shorter wavelengths bend or reflect very little and travel on a line of sight.

of Maxwell's electromagnetic waves by experimentally generating radio waves in his laboratory.[2] Many inventions followed, making practical the use of radio waves to transfer information through space. [edit]Propagation Main article: Radio propagation The study of electromagnetic phenomena such as reflection, refraction, polarization, diffraction and absorption is of critical importance in the study of how radio waves move in free space and over the surface of the Earth. Different frequencies experience different combinations of these phenomena in the Earth's atmosphere, making certain radio bands more useful for specific purposes than others. [edit]Radio communication In order to receive radio signals, for instance from AM/FM radio stations, a radio antenna must be used. However, since the antenna will pick up thousands of radio signals at a time,

Discovery and utilization Main article: History of radio

a radio tuner is necessary to tune in to a particular frequency (or frequency range).[3] This is typically done via a resonator (in its simplest form, a circuit with a capacitor and an inductor). The resonator is configured to resonate at a particular frequency (or frequency band), thus amplifying sine waves at that radio frequency, while ignoring other sine waves. Usually, either the inductor or the capacitor of the resonator is adjustable, allowing the user to change the frequency at which it resonates.[4] [edit]In medicine

Rough plot of Earth's atmospheric transmittance (or opacity) to various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. Radio waves were first predicted by mathematical work done in 1865 by James Clerk Maxwell.[1] Maxwell noticed wavelike properties of light and similarities in electrical and magnetic observations. He then proposed equations that described light waves and radio waves as waves of electromagnetism that travel in space. In 1887, Heinrich Hertzdemonstrated the reality

Radio frequency (RF) energy has been used in medical treatments for over 75 years[5] generally for minimally invasive surgeries andcoagulation, including the treatment of sleep apnea.[6] Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses radio frequency waves to generate images of the human body.