Online A general term referring to anything connected to or conveyed through a communication network.

Organization The classification to which a Domain Name belongs.

Typical Suffixes are: .com = Commercial, .org = Organization, .edu = Educational, .int = International, .gov = Government, .mil = Military, .net = Network

OS (Operating System) Software designed to control the hardware of a specific data-processing system in order to allow users and application programs to employ it easily. (MacOS, Windows 95)

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Page Also known as a web page, a page is defined as a single file on a web server. For example, a page could be an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document, an image, a java applet, a CGI script, etc. Any file that is neither a gif nor a jpeg is considered a page.

Pageviews A page is defined as any file dished out by a web server that would generally be considered a web document. This includes HTML pages (.html, .htm, .shtml), script-generated pages (.cgi, .asp, .cfm, etc.), and plain-text pages. Image files (.jpeg, .gif, .png, etc.), sound files (.wav, .aiff, etc.), video files (.mov, etc.), and other non-document files do not count as pages. Each time a file defined as a page is served, a pageview is registered by Urchin.

PDF Portable Document Format. File format developed by Adobe Systems to allow for display and printing of formatted documents across platforms and systems. PDF files can be read on any system equipped with the Acrobat Reader software, regardless of whether or not your computer has the software that the document was created in.

Platforms A platform is a hardware and software combination that represents a specific user experience and method of accessing the Internet. Common platforms include "Windows NT" (Microsoft Windows NT on a standard Intel-type PC), "Mac PPC" (Macintosh with Power PC processor), Red Hat Linux 6.1 (Linux is a UNIX-like operating system), etc.

Protocol An established method of exchanging data over the Internet.

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Referrals A referral occurs when any hyperlink is clicked on that takes a web surfer to any page or file in another website; it could be text, an image, or any other type of link. When a web surfer arrives at your site from another site, the server records the referral information in the hit log for every file requested by that surfer. If a search engine was used to obtain the link, the search engine name and any keywords used are recorded as well.

Referrer The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.

Reverse DNS Name resolution software that looks up an IP address to obtain a domain name. It performs the opposite function of the DNS server, which turns names into IP addresses.

Robot A robot is a program that runs automatically without human intervention. Typically, a robot is endowed with some very basic logic so that it can react to different situations it may encounter. One common type of robot is a content-indexing spider, or webcrawler.

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Scalable Quality of an implementation that allows it to grow as the usage of the service increases.

Script A short computer program written in a simplified programming language, such as JavaScript, VBScript, or Perl.

Search Engine A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Although a search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Alta Vista and Excite that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Server Part of a network that supplies files and services to clients. A file server is dedicated to storing files, and a print server provides printing for many PCs. A mail server handles mail within a network and with the Internet. A web server is a computer that hosts information available to anyone accessing the Internet.

Software The programs, routines, and symbolic languages that control the functioning of the hardware and direct its operation. Written programs or procedures or rules and associated documentation pertaining to the operation of a computer system and that are stored in read/write memory.

Source Also know as source code. The actual text and commands stored in an HTML file (including tags, comments, and scripts) that may not be visible when the page is viewed with a web browser.

Spider A spider is a program that automatically fetches web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. They are called spiders because they “crawl” over the web. Because most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.

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URL Uniform Resource Locator is a means of identifying an exact location on the Internet. For example, http://www.urchin.com/support/platforms.html is the URL that defines the use of HTTP to access the web page platforms.html in the /support/ directory on the Urchin website. URLs typically have four parts: protocol type (HTTP), host domain name (www.urchin.com), directory path (/support/), and file name (platforms.html).

User For purposes of Urchin, User is defined as a person within a customer group who has specific report access.

Username A Username name used to gain access to a computer system. Usernames, and usually passwords, are required in multi-user systems. In most such systems, users can choose their own usernames and passwords.

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Visitor A visitor is defined as a series of hits, with no idle time of 30 minutes or more between any two hits, from the same IP address. Explanation: when a web surfer arrives at your site, he/she requests the files, such as GIFs and JPEGs, that make up that particular page. Each request is a hit, and they are delivered in quick succession, with no more than few seconds between them (from the server's perspective). When Urchin detects a gap of more than 30 minutes between any two hits from the same IP address, it is assumed that it is a new visitor. This is usually true, since most large ISPs, such as EarthLink, recycle idle IP addresses.

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Web Server This term can apply to the server hardware or the server software, and is used interchangably, which can be confusing. The intent must be determined by the context in which the term is used. It will mean one of two things:

• The physical computer that acts as a server. This is a computer just like any other in most respects, except that it is often equipped with redundant components (hard drives, power supplies, etc.) for reliability. It is called a web server because its main function is to deliver web pages.

• The software that serves the web pages (HTML, etc.) This special software runs all the time (a "daemon" -- pronounced "demon") and listens for requests for web pages. When a request comes in from the web, the server software interprets the request and sends out the file. The most common type of web server software for UNIX platforms is Apache. For Windows it is Internet Information Server, or IIS. Others include iPlanet and Zeus.

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