Glossary of Internet Service Related Terms

Gateway

A gateway refers to hardware or software that bridges the gap between two otherwise incompatible applications or networks so that data can be transferred among different computers. Gateways are common with e-mail that gets sent back and forth between Internet sites and commercial online services (like America Online) that have their own internal e-mail systems.

Gateway Pages

A Web page submitted to individual search engine spiders to meet specific relevancy algorithms. The gateway page presents information to the spider while obscuring it from human viewers. The purpose of gateway pages is to present the spider with the format it needs for optimum rankings while presenting a more appropriate version to human viewers. It's also a way for Webmasters to avoid publicly disclosing placement tactics. The use of gateway pages customizes submission to each individual search engine. Also known as doorway pages, bridge pages, entry pages, portals or portal pages.

GIF

Acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, GIF is a graphics file format that uses a compression scheme originally developed by CompuServe. Because GIF files are compressed, the file can be quickly and easily transmitted over a network. That's why it is the most commonly used graphics format on the World Wide Web.

GIG - Gigabyte - Gb

A Gigabyte equals 1024 Megabytes. Often referred to when defining bandwidth parameters or limits in web hosting. More and more hosting companies are allowing up to one gigabyte of storage in their hosting plans.

Gigabyte

A measurement of storage space. Equal to a thousand megabytes.

GoLive

Adobe's web site creation software, comparable to Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage in function. Go Live is built to be compatible with Adobe's other products including Photoshop and Acrobat Reader.

Google

Currently the most important spidering search engine, Google is dominating the search engine market. Google is an Internet search engine that ranks web pages in a list of hits by giving weight to the links that reference a specific page. It can be found at www.google.com

Gopher

Gopher is an application that was developed at the University of Minnesota to help organize files on the Internet. Named after the school's football mascot, Gopher is a subject-based, menu-driven guide to finding and retrieving directories of information on the Internet.

Guestbook

A common preinstalled CGI-script used to obtain web site visitor information such as contact names, addresses, email, etc.

GUI

A GUI, short for graphical user interface, allows users to navigate and interact with information on their computer screen by using a mouse to point, click, and drag icons and other data around on the screen, instead of typing in words and phrases. The Windows and Macintosh operating systems are examples of GUIs. The World Wide Web is an example of a GUI designed to enhance navigation of the Internet, once done exclusively via terminal-based (typed command line) functions.