March 1998

GLOSSARY

Bandwidth: The number of bytes used in transmitting WWW site's content. NetIntellect doesn't include TCP/IP overhead or the actual browser requests with in its bandwidth counts because these values are not logged.

Caching: The procedure whereby a WWW site's content is uploaded by a service (e.g. AOL) or organization (e.g. a company). This allows the data to be served to the users more efficiently and quickly. However, the content provider (site) will not receive any hits from users who unknowingly receive cached data.

Directory: World Wide Web pages consist of varying files. These files are often set up in a directory structure, resembling "tree branches". Directories are usually structured to keep similar topics within a specifically named directory. For example, all news reports may be stored in a directory such as /Web_site/news/

Geography: The continent, country, region, state, city, and Zip code are based on an organization's Internet domain registration. Only Internet domains found within the NetIntellect Organizational database are included within region, state, city, and Zip code analyses. Each Internet domain is associated with only one Zip code, so all users from a domain used in multiple locations are considered to be at one location.

Home Page: The HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) page a user sees upon initial log-in.

Organization: A commercial, academic, nonprofit, government, or military entity that connects users to the Internet, identified by an entity's Internet domains. Using the NetIntellect's Organizational database, NetIntellect groups together all domains registered to the same organization as one organization.

Page (HTML) Request: The act of a user directing the Web Browser to "get" a page from a site, and the transmittal of that page to the user. An HTML page may include text, graphics, JAVA applets, and other elements. A page can be formatted in many ways, and includes links to other HTML pages both within the site or elsewhere on the Internet. Page requests are not a measurement of hits. Page requests do not include hits to images. Page requests do not include component pages of a frame unless directly requested. Local usage is not included in the counts of page requests reported herein.

Time Zone: World Wide Web servers record all requests in local time where the server is located. The server does not record the users' local time.

User: Anyone who visits the site at least once.

Visit (User Session): A series of consecutive requests from a user to an Internet site. If the log files include referrer data, then new visits begin with referring links external to the Internet site. Regardless of whether or not you have referrer data, if a user doesn't make a request for 30 minutes (if you define the visit as 30 minutes), the previous series of requests is considered a completed visit.