Web Browsers and Search Engines: Computer Notes

The correct answer is B, Tim Berners-Lee. He was a British scientist working at CERN in Switzerland when he wrote the proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989, and he built the first browser, WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus; the first website went live in 1991. He also founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Option A, Charles Babbage, belongs to the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, not to the Web at all. Option C, Vinton Cerf, with Robert Kahn designed the TCP/IP protocols and is called a father of the internet, which is the network beneath the Web, so he is the classic distractor in this question. Option D, Marc Andreessen, led the team that wrote Mosaic in 1993 and later founded Netscape, but he came after Berners-Lee and invented neither the Web nor the first browser.

The correct answer is B, Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the complete address of a resource on the Web, and it has three visible parts: the protocol, such as https, the domain name, such as www.example.in, and the path to the particular page inside that site. Option A, Universal Resource Link, mixes the right idea with the wrong words; the first word is uniform, not universal, and the last is locator, not link, so it is wrong even though it sounds familiar. Option C, Unified Retrieval Locator, invents a term that no standard uses and should be rejected at sight. Option D, Uniform Reference Line, keeps only the first word correctly and is otherwise meaningless. Examiners rely on candidates half-remembering the expansion, so learn the three words in order: uniform, resource, locator.

The correct answer is C, Blink. The browser engine, also called the layout or rendering engine, is the part that turns the HTML received from a server into the page you see, and Chrome has used Blink since 2013; Opera and Microsoft Edge use the same engine today, which is why pages look alike in all three. Option A, Gecko, is the engine of Mozilla Firefox, and it grew out of the old Netscape code, so it is the right answer to a different question. Option B, Trident, was the engine of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and is no longer in use now that Edge has replaced that browser. Option D, WebKit, is Apple's engine and powers Safari; Blink itself began as a branch of WebKit, which is why the two names are so often confused in papers.

The correct answer is B, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two were research students at Stanford University in the United States, and the ranking method they built, PageRank, is named after Larry Page rather than after web pages, a point papers like to test. Option A, Jerry Yang and David Filo, founded Yahoo! in 1994, four years before Google, and Yahoo began life as a hand-made directory of websites rather than a crawler-based engine. Option C, Gabriel Weinberg, started DuckDuckGo in 2008, the engine known for not keeping a profile of its users. Option D, Robin Li and Eric Xu, founded Baidu in China in 2000, which is the leading search engine of that country. Remember the four pairs with their years and countries, because questions are set by swapping one founder for another.

The correct answer is C, Safari. Apple released Safari in 2003 and ships it with its computers, tablets and phones; it runs on Apple's own WebKit engine. Option A, Google Chrome, released in 2008, is the browser most used worldwide and can certainly be installed on a Mac, but it is not the one supplied with the system, and the question asks for the default. Option B, Microsoft Edge, released in 2015, is the default browser of current versions of Windows, replacing Internet Explorer there, so it is the right answer only if the question names Windows. Option D, Mozilla Firefox, released in 2004 by the Mozilla Foundation, is free and open-source and is the browser bundled with several Linux distributions, but again it must be installed separately on a Mac. Match each operating system with its own browser: Windows with Edge, macOS with Safari.

The correct answer is C, 443. HTTPS is the HyperText Transfer Protocol wrapped in SSL or TLS encryption, so that what passes between the browser and the server cannot be read on the way; the padlock shown in the address bar means the page came over HTTPS. Option A, 21, is the port of FTP, the File Transfer Protocol used to move files to and from a server, and it is a common distractor because it also belongs to the internet family. Option B, 80, is the port of plain HTTP, the unencrypted form of the same protocol, and it is the trap in this question for candidates who remember only one web port. Option D, 25, belongs to SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol that sends outgoing email. Learn the set together: FTP 21, SMTP 25, HTTP 80, POP3 110 and HTTPS 443.

The correct answer is B, cookie. A cookie holds a few lines of text, such as a session number or a chosen language, and the browser sends it back to the same site on the next visit, which is how a shopping cart or a logged-in session survives from one page to the next. Option A, the cache, is also a store kept by the browser, but it holds copies of images, style files and pages already downloaded so that they need not be fetched again; it speeds up the site, it does not identify the visitor. Option C, a bookmark, is simply an address the user chooses to save, called a favourite in Edge, and the website has no part in creating it. Option D, a cursor, is the mark on the screen showing where typing or clicking will take effect, and has nothing to do with storage.

The correct answer is B, .org. The top-level domain is the last part of a domain name, and .org was set aside for organisations, particularly non-commercial and non-profit bodies, when the first domains were created. Option A, .com, was meant for commercial undertakings and is today the most common domain of all, used by companies of every kind. Option C, .net, was intended for networks and network service providers such as internet companies, although it is now used widely by others as well. Option D, .edu, is reserved for educational institutions, and in practice it is restricted to recognised universities and colleges, largely in the United States; Indian institutions more often use .ac.in or .edu.in. Papers also ask about .gov for government bodies, .mil for the armed forces and the country codes such as .in for India, so learn the whole list together.

The correct answer is B, crawler. A crawler, also called a spider or a bot, starts from a list of addresses, fetches each page, follows the links it finds and hands the pages over to be indexed; without it a search engine would have nothing to search. Option A, a compiler, is a program of a completely different kind: it translates the whole of a program written in a high-level language into machine code before the program is run, and it belongs to the chapter on language processors. Option C, a firewall, is the hardware or software guard placed between a private network and the outside, deciding which traffic may pass; it blocks, it does not collect. Option D, a plug-in, is a small add-on that gives a browser an extra ability, such as playing a particular kind of media, and it works inside the browser only.

The correct answer is A, PageRank. The method counts the links pointing at a page and weighs each link by the importance of the page it comes from, so that a page linked by many respected pages rises in the results. Its name comes from Larry Page, who devised it with Sergey Brin at Stanford University, and not, as most candidates assume, from the words web page. Option B, HITS, standing for Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search, is a genuine link-analysis algorithm developed by Jon Kleinberg at about the same time, but it was never Google's own method and is the strongest distractor here. Option C, RankBrain, is a much later machine-learning system added by Google to help interpret unfamiliar queries, so it is neither original nor named after a founder. Option D, SiteScore, is not the name of any such algorithm.

The correct answer is B, Mosaic. Mosaic was written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the United States by a team that included Marc Andreessen, and it was the first browser to show pictures inside the page alongside the text instead of in a separate window, which is why it is credited with carrying the Web to ordinary users. Option A, Netscape Navigator, came a year later in 1994 and was built by many of the same people after they left; it became the leading browser of the middle nineties but was not the first. Option C, Internet Explorer, was released by Microsoft in 1995 and was bundled with Windows, which is how it overtook Netscape. Option D, Opera, also dates from 1995 and comes from Norway. The strictly first browser of all remains Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb of 1990, which was not graphical in this sense.

The correct answer is B, the history and cookies of that session. When an incognito window is closed, the browser throws away the list of pages visited in it, the cookies the sites placed and whatever was typed into forms, so that the next person at the same computer finds no trace. Option A is wrong because the connection is made in exactly the same way; the mode changes only what is written to the disk afterwards. Option C is wrong because bookmarks saved earlier remain untouched, and in fact a bookmark created inside an incognito window is kept as well. Option D is wrong because material already in the cache from normal browsing stays where it is; what the mode avoids is adding new entries to it. The important caution is that the mode hides nothing from the website, the employer's network or the internet service provider.