Hello good people,
one of my pass-times is helping others with their I.T. problems.
With some of my friends I find the use of metaphors very helpful to describe programs, hardware and software.
In order to explain the Internet, browsers and search engines I describe the Internet as a road network, the browser as a car and a search engine as your atlas/road map.
I’ve never been really comfortable with this analogy though and am looking for an improvement, suggestion please?
Peter
The internet as a library, the search engine as the expert librarian?
I have always thought of the search engine as more of a card catalog, librarians are more experts not just in indexing but in how to perform research. any idiot can use google, not everyone can get good useful information from it.
The internet is a network of roads, but only remote control cars with little cameras can travel on it. The websites are peoples homes and business, each has an address. The browser is a feature on the user’s TV set that instructs a remote control car with camera to go those addresses.
If you want to get into search engines, one of those addresses is a big phone book with yellow pages to look for the person or business you want to see. There are also a bunch of elves who can reorder the phone book so that you can look for anything about those locations in alphabetical order, not just the name of the person or business.
I don’t like analogies like this because I don’t think they help people understand what’s going on. Analogies can sometimes serve a narrow purpose but are by their nature flawed. I mean *any *analogy about anything. Analogies about IT can sometimes lead people to extend the analogy and reach a false conclusion (“Oh, a browser is like a car, so if I get a better browser I can download information faster?”)
One exception might be “a URL is like a street address,” but that’s still not a good analogy because it’s really a surrogate for an IP address and the average person usually doesn’t need to know about IP addresses.
Instead I try to talk about this at a high level of abstraction. The Internet isn’t quite like anything else so I just try to explain things in very simple terms.
Analogies are a good place to start. It helps demystify things. But if you have a real interest in understanding, it gets a lot more complex.
Thanks for that TriPolar, although I might disagree, I think certain browsers are faster for certain tasks, Wolfram Alpha comes to mind.
I also accept that concrete information is a better foundation for comprehension than abstract similes, however sometimes the ‘quick and dirty’ analogy works more efficiently, I’m a great believer in the ‘teach someone to fish rather than giving them a fish’ idea.
I suppose all analogies have their limit but if my explanations are sufficient unto the day and earn me a cup of tea and a bikkie then I’m happy
P
Maybe, but it is increasingly the case that search engines try to interpret the context and intent of the query. They’re not just indexing systems any more, they interpret, correct, etc.
I’ve described browsers as a fresh plate in a buffet. Once you are done with the “entree” you can just chuck it and get a clean one.
The Internet is one of those things that I don’t think works well by analogy. It’s too fundamentally different from anything else.
I just give a very simplified explanation that computers talk to each other through the Internet. Some computers are set up to send you websites on request and that the URL is that request, identifying both the computer and the information (the page/file) you want. Search engines read the content on all these other computers so that they can point you to something that seems relevant when you type in a search.
The Internet is a practical application of Quantum physics. It is a world-wide superposition of interacting wave functions, mediated by “virtual particles”, the packets that go back and forth to transmit information. Browsers shoot photons (DMS requests) that have no specific location or velocity, but rather just pervade the net, until they hit upon the properly entangled particle (a DMS server that knows the IP address for the requested URL). The server’s wave function collapses, and a counter-photon returns to the browser with the requested specific information (that the cat is alive or dead, e.g.) But if the desired address is beyond the browser’s event horizon (outside its spacetime event cone), you get a 404 error instead.
There. I hope that clarifies how the Internet works.
:rolleyes: So give us an actual example of how you would explain the Internet (or, more relevantly, the Web) to someone who is naïve about it, in simple terms, without using metaphor.
The internet is a bunch of computers that are all connected to share information.
Web sites reside on some of these computers and URL/domain names are how we connect to the right computer. There are special computers out there that keep track of where each website is located so that when you type www.facebook.com you connect to the correct computer to display the website hosted there.
A browser is a tool that transfers the information from the other computer and displays it to you and also sometimes lets you send information to that computer to be stored there (think facebook status or a google search term).
A search engine is perhaps well-served by an analogy to a card catalog as mentioned above (although it’s more complicated than that). It keeps track of what everybody that wanted to know about a certain topic found helpful so that when you want to know about that topic it points you to the right website(s). You send your search terms to the other computer (using your browser), it looks up the results and sends them back to your computer (to be displayed by your browser).
So I open my browser and type in google.com. My computer connects to the special address computer to figure out where “google.com” resides. That computer tells my broswer the right address and my browser displays the website on the google.com computer. I type in “straight dope board” to tell the google.com computer to look up what other people that wanted to know about the “straight dope board” found useful. This gives me a link to a computer called “boards.straightdope.com”. When I click on that link my browser connects to that other computer (after looking it up on the address computer) and downloads the web site from the straightdope.com computer. And so on…
No real need for metaphors in explaining the Web, really.
That’s because you already have an idea how it works. Analogies are for those who have no idea, or even worse, have the wrong idea.
Sometimes I think of it in terms of a post office network, which is convenient because it allows for multiple levels of complexity as an analogy.
You’re at your house and you want to communicate with somebody in, oh, China. Sometimes you just want to send a letter (an email), sometimes a package (a file attachment). All you need to know is their address (just like their email or web address) and pay some postage (your ISP fees). The post office takes care of the details:
You put the letter in your mailbox (make a TCP/IP request), the Post Office drives it through public roads (network infrastructure/fiber), first collecting it at regional post offices, then moving it to big central sorting hubs (level I/II service providers) where they look up the destination address in a big database. Then it gets put on a ship or airplane to another country (intercontinental trunks/satellite links), their sorting center (ISPs) take the mail and send it to increasingly regional post offices until finally it gets to their postman (some subnet) who delivers it to the recipient. Etc.
Other relevant parts of the analogy:
The hub-and-spoke model is how the internet often actually works.
Street addresses are like domain names, human-readable abstractions of a geographic coordinate or an IP address. The Post Office (ISP) looks this up in a map (DNS server).
If you live in a really small town, there’s no need to go through the whole dance and you can just stay regional (subnets, LANs, etc.)
There’s nothing stopping you from setting up your own mail network with your friends (LAN), but nobody outside it will likely see it unless you set up some sort of special deal with the post office.
Customs=national firewalls.
Mailbox #s (like at a big company or P.O. boxes) = Port numbers.
Bandwidth = package size limitations.
Delivery speed = ping.
Network protocols = different types of mail services (UDP = no return receipt; HTTPS = certified mail)
Compression = mailing a DVD full of pictures instead of a huge box of photos
Traffic accidents = packet loss
Blah blah…
A simple metaphor really dosn’t work too well. The above describes some of the issues. First up it is instructive to look at those parts of the question that the student doesn’t understand. You may be surprised at what things really need clarification, and those that don’t.
My parents often talk about “what Google says” as if the entire Internet is inside Google. They complain that Google gets information wrong sometimes - when they have simply gone to some idiot’s blog.
You can describe individual parts of the workings of the internet by metaphor, but I would not try to find an all encompassing one.
URL’s as phone book entries isn’t too bad. You can even describe some URL’s as being like some phone numbers that can go to different cities depending upon where the call is made from.
Describing Google and other search engines is harder. Getting people to understand that the search engine doesn’t try to answer a question, but just looks for stuff on the page that matches what you type into the search box is important. Just getting that single idea across to anyone pushed their Google-fu up a notch instantly. You can describe Google as a concordance - but most people won’t know what one of those is, so the metaphor isn’t all that useful. Perhaps you could describe Google more like an autistic savant - like Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond in Rain Man. Lots of information, perfect recall - so long as you know what to ask - and no understanding of what it means. Give him a random number and he could might tell you whose phone number its is, what its prime factors are, and that it is the date of some historical event. Your problem to work out which of these is what you wanted, if any.
Except Wolfram Alpha isn’t a browser; it’s a web app, something you can’t really explain if you insist that web browsers are cars.
I think part of it is that people get all wound up and confused by the different layers of networking involved.
You don’t have to get into the ins and outs of TCP/IP, fiber, 802.11, VDSL, cable modems or any of that stuff to describe how the internet works at a high level. Most people are satisfied with an answer of that level- they don’t really care that 802.11 is radio ethernet, and that your router routes information from one network to another, or that it’s probably set up to do NAT, or that it probably has a built in firewall.
At it’s highest level, the internet is a network of computers. Your browser is sort of like your window onto that network. Search engines are a smaller set of those computers that put very simply, answer questions worded a certain way about where to find certain information on other computers.
You could even use that same library analogy, except as an Oxford Bodleian style library where the librarians retrieve stuff from the stacks. In that analogy, the library is the internet, the desk where you make requests is the browser (in a sense), and the library staff are the search engines. The networks would be represented by walking paths, pneumatic tubes, actual internet connections, or any other way that the desk and librarians would actually physically get you the information you requested.
This implies that the only way to explain something to someone who has no idea how it works is through metaphor. I disagree. Some things don’t analogize well, and are better explained from first principles.
I didn’t mention metaphors at all, and your own explanation used an analogy, and in addition it wouldn’t explain anything to anyone who didn’t already have an understanding of electronic communication. In addition I didn’t imply analogies were the only way to explain something, but I’ll state that it is the best way to begin explaining something to someone who has no knowledge of the subject. In addition, the first first principles that you learn must be explained by analogy, that is nature of language and learning.