Today’s market is cluttered with security software offering anywhere from 4 to 15 features. Which one of these software features is important? Which ones do you absolutely need? Which ones are already present on your computer? Almost all vendors sell a basic version and then have a premium package that costs more. Are the extra dollars worth it? Read on to find out.

The ones you absolutely, definitely need Anti Virus – Detects and removes viruses from your hard drive, emails, & downloaded files. Needs to update frequently and automatically to keep up with the newest viruses.

Personal Firewall – Blocks hackers and other malicious network programs trying to attack your computer and network. Monitors inbound and outbound network connections from your computer.

Anti Spyware – Blocks and removes spyware / adware which is a malicious program or code hidden in acceptable files. This includes the latest rootkit programs which are used to hide the malware, spyware from other detection programs.

The Good to haves Anti Phishing / Fraud Defense – Protects you from online scams designed to steal credit card and bank account numbers. This capability is already present in the most common browsers – Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Wireless Network Monitoring – Guards against unauthorized users invading your wireless home network. You can configure this facility in your wireless router with access IDs, passwords and network addresses.

Online Identity Protection – Guards against online identity theft. Again, most transaction sites provide secure authentication. Also most credit and debit cards today come with a online protection service with a full refund.

The Extras Anti Spam – Filters annoying and potentially dangerous email. If you use a web based mail service like yahoo, hotmail or gmail, they already provide this service. Even if you open a bad email, you should be protected if you have the other tools running.

Pop-Up blocker – Blocks annoying pop-ups and potentially dangerous scripts. The most popular browsers (IE & Firefox) already have this utility integrated into them.

More recently, security software has been offered with data backup and system performance software. These are extras, and should already be part of your operating system. Most security companies offer more or less the same features and capabilties. Everybody knows Norton & McAfee. A couple more to consider are Trend Micro & Zone Labs. Almost all of these have free versions to download and test. Another company that offers a good free Antivirus is AVG (Grisoft).

Just a little over ten years ago, if a person needed information they were forced to go to the local library and spend hours entombed amongst shelves of books. Now that the internet is available in almost every home finding information is easier then ever before. Now when someone needs information all they have to do is boot up their computer and type their needs into a search engine.

A search engine is an information retrieval system that is designed to help find information stored on a ca computer system.

In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montreal. The search engine was called Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. FTPs (short for File Transfer Protocol) are used to transfer data from one computer to another ocer the internet, or through a network that supports TCP/IP protocol. In its early days Archie contacted a list of FTP archives approximately once a month with a request for a listing. Once Archie received a listing it was stored in local files and could be searched using a UNIX grep command. In its early days Archie was a local tool but as the kinks got worked out and it became more efficient it became a network wide resource. Archie users could utilize Archie’s services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files.

A student at the University of Minnesota created a search engine that indexed plain text files in 1991. They named the program Gopher after the University of Minnesota’s mascot.

In 1993 a student at MIT created Wandx, the first Web search engine.

Today, search engines match a user’s keyword query with a list of potential websites that might have the information the users is looking for. The search engine does this by using a software code that is called a crawler to probe web pages that match the user’s keyword. Once the crawler has identified web pages that may be what the user is looking for the search engine uses a variety of statistical techniques to establish each pages importance. Most search engines establish the importance of hits based on the frequency of word distribution. Once the search engine has finished searching web pages it provides a list of web sites to the user.

Today, when an internet user types a word into a search engine they are given a list of websites that might be able to provide them with the information they seek. The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther they the second page the search engine provides. Webmasters are constantly finding themselves forced to use new methods of search engine optimization to be highly ranked by the search engines.

In 2000, a study was done by Lawrence and Giles that suggested internet search engines were only able to index sixteen percent of all available webpage’s.