The World-Wide Web:

PC Magazine's Guided Tour of 100 Hot Sites

You can download the TOP 100 file for importing into your Netscape 1.1 Bookmarks: pcbkmark.zip
By Don Willmott

The Internet may be hot, but the World-Wide Web--the Internet's collection of thousands of informative, graphical, multimedia-ready, hyperlinked sites--is even hotter.

First launched by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in 1989 as a way to send graphical documents around the world easily, the World-Wide Web exploded in popularity once the first easy-to-use Web exploration software package, Mosaic, was released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

In the past 18 months, companies, universities, and all kinds of individuals have realized how easy it is to publish information on the Web using the relatively simple hypertext markup language (HTML) commands. Hundreds of new "home pages," containing everything from databases of international trade law to the fingerpaintings of a four-year-old from Oregon to background information on a serial bomber, are coming on-line every day. The breadth of the content is astonishing, although its depth is sometimes less inspiring.

First you need a fast Internet connection (for details on establishing one, see "Making the Internet Connection" October 11, 1994) and a Web browser (see "The Web Untangled," February 7, 1994, where Netscape Navigator was the Editors' Choice) or Web access through on-line services such as Delphi and Prodigy (and soon through America Online and CompuServe). Now you're ready to explore the Web. You'll join 3 million other active Web users who browse through more than 2,000 commercial sites and countless thousands of educational and government sites. You'll soon see how big cyberspace really is.

As you take hyperlinked jumps from server to server and home page to home page, traveling all around the world without ever leaving your desk chair, it's easy to be amazed by the places you can go. It's equally easy to be amazed by how little you find at some sites once you arrive, and how shallow and sometimes questionable some of the information is.

Businesses, government agencies, universities, libraries, and even individuals with resumes to hawk are rushing to set up home pages. Sometimes, interesting, accurate, and up-to-date content is the last thing on their minds. And you shouldn't be surprised when you continually run into the three most annoying words on the Web: "currently under construction."

You can avoid some of that frustration by taking advantage of the exploring we've done for you. What follows is a list of 100 of the most interesting, useful, and fun home pages on the Web. It would have been easier to pick 1,000, but these sites are good examples of the Web's potential.

Our coverage is organized into five categories: Web Search Tools (the home pages that direct you to your personal areas of interest); Computing; Education, Fun, and Fringe Activities; Government; and Business. All the information is collected in tables that you can clip and save.

Search Tools/Indexes/Lists of Sites

The Web is so big and getting so much bigger every day that you easily could spend days or weeks searching for that one essential home page or document, but who has the time and patience?

Fortunately, the Web contains dozens of on-line directories, lists of lists, indexes, databases, and search tools that help you narrow your searches quickly. Some cast wide nets; others (especially the ones you pay for) can quickly zero in on exactly what you need.

All around the Web you'll also find sites that are nothing more than long lists of links to other sites. The best of these are helpfully arranged in logical indexes. Check out Yahoo to get a good idea of just how useful these indexes can be.

And don't forget that Web browsing packages include bookmarks or hot lists. Whenever you arrive at a page that holds any interest at all for you, remember to add it to your list. That way, you'll always be able to get back to it with just one mouse click, and you'll never have to type in its unwieldy Internet address again.

Any time you go off to explore the Web you should have one or more of these search tools on your hot list. You'll be needing them.

Government

Here are your tax dollars at work. A quick tour around some of the U.S. government's Web home pages gives you a good idea of how the Internet could someday be used as a real tool of democracy.

You can easily rummage through the files of many government agencies (you'll get access only to what they want you to see, of course), visit military bases, and follow the workings of Congress with new tools like Thomas, the searchable database of recent legislation. You can even explore the White House, though the closest you'll get to the president is an encounter with Socks the cat.

You may want to begin at the list of government servers, a good jumping-off point to the inner workings of dozens of Federal agencies and bureaus. And whatever you do, don't miss the Library of Congress; its on-line exhibitions are sometimes dazzling. Recent topics included the Dead Sea scrolls and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Education/Fun/Fringe Activities

Fun, entertainment, and learning have found their way onto the Internet in an amazingly wide variety of forms and styles.

Thousands of personal home pages, hundreds of self-published e-zines, and plenty of on-line games abound. Hobbyists, special interest groups, artists, and even fans of classic TV shows can all find a place to share their interests and compare notes.

Record companies and movie studios have embraced the Web, providing samples of their wares for viewing or downloading. Museums guide you on virtual tours, though enjoying their graphics can sometimes require incredible patience.

For an idea of how the Web can be used as a marketing tool, explore the Internet Underground Music Archive. For $75 a year, this service posts musicians' sound clips, photos, and band info and catalogs them by genre and location. It's a great idea, and it's well executed.

Education isn't neglected, either. Some of the Web home pages for children that we've listed here provide excellent links to all kinds of services and tools for school-age kids. One great example that's not in the list below: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories' virtual frog dissection (http://george.lbl.gov/ITG.hm. pg.docs/dissect/info.html). It's incredible, and it doesn't smell like formaldehyde.

Computing

It's only natural that computer vendors were among the first businesses to flock to the Web and set up home pages. Here we list sites of major PC, software, and hardware vendors. These companies are using their home pages as another means of reaching out to their customers to tell them about new products and help them solve existing problems.

It's not an exaustive list by any means, but these sites show off an interesting mix of good product and marketing information. The best mix in a dash of dynamic flair. Two pages in particular, Compaq and Silicon Graphics, use especially beautiful graphics to excite you about their products.

We also list home pages of some of the most notable providers of Internet-related products, because they have some of the latest and best information about what's happening on the Web--and often the software to match.

Here's a helpful hint: If you don't know the address of a particular company's home page, you can often have luck simply by putting the name of the company into WWW address format and giving it a try. For example, it's no big surprise that the address for Novell's Web site is http://www.novell.com and that IBM can be found at http://www.ibm.com. It doesn't always work, but it is often worth a try

One last hint: If you type in a long Web address and get a message giving you some kind of indication that the location can't be found, try typing in less of the address. Remove the last few items (the parts that often look like filenames). This trick may help you get close to where you want to be.

Business/Commerce/Shopping

Internet digital cash isn't a reality yet, and security concerns about confidential financial data traveling over the Web may hinder the acceptance of on-line shopping (you should always think twice before typing your credit card number in). But that doesn't mean you can't do some shopping--or at least a little Web window shopping.

There's something of a gold rush mentality on the Internet today; unfortunately, the tools of the trade are a bit more complicated than picks and shovels.

Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1995

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