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Not that we're fans of them ourselves. Electronic Auctions have become quite popular.Online auctions are not only getting bigger and bigger, some have stocks on wall street that are stratospheric! One such site is eBay, which was started in 1995 by a couple interested in collecting Pez® candy dispensers. Today, eBay is the second most popular site in the internet in the USA.

Making Friends online can be quite fun and interesting. I myself have online pals from many U.S. States such as Maine, New Hampshire, Utah, California, New Mexico. As well as other countries like Canada, Australia, Holland, England, and even Russia! Software you can download are Yahoo messenger found at Yahoo! (I use this one quite frequently, my username is sandman_us_31) and ICQ (Short for "I Seek You") at http:www.mirabilis.com and Even if you don't use America Online, you can download their AOL Instant Messenger. Check http://www.aol.com and locate "Instant Messenger" to get a copy.

Search engines are sites for looking up web sites on a particular subject. Among the biggest and best Search engines are: Excite at http://www.excite.com, AltaVista at http://www.altavista.com, GoTo.com at....yes, you guessed it http://www.goto.com. Infoseek is extremely intuitive and highly responsive at http://www.infoseek.com (Infoseek and Goto.com have merged recently, so either one will get you to the same place). Yahoo! is the grandaddy of search engines! Absolutely ancient at 5 years old (Yes 5 years is a LONG TIME in Internet terms). It has an extensive list and is often pudgy and unresponsive, but you still might like to check it out at http://www.yahoo.com. Lycos is among my personal favorites, it is a fine example of what a gateway site should be! It offers E-mail and other fine services. Check out Lycos at http://www.lycos.com. Netscape, the makers of the Browser "Netscape Navigator" also have their own search engine, geared mainly to Netscape users. This one is at http://www.netscape.com. Among the Newcomers are Looksmart at http://www.looksmart.com. and Mamma at http://www.mamma.com. Most Search engines are easy to find if you know their domain name. For example the domain name "Looksmart".....well, look at all the search engines I placed here. Notice anything similar? They all have http://www."Domain name".com.

Ellensburg has 3 major Internet Service Providers (ISP) at the time this article was written.They are:

Computer Central (http://www.eburg.com, they are the next biggest and from what I gather most popular)

Upper Kittitas County residents can use Inland Internet by calling (509) 649-INET (4638) in Roslyn. I do not have URL information on this one, sorry!

Be on the lookout if you run Internet Explorer! A worm has made it's way to a friend of ours in Ellensburg. The Worm calls itself "Afrodite" if you get ANY Message with this name in it, Play it safe and do not open it! ESPECIALLY if you do not know the sender! This Worm duplicates itself again and again until your hard drive is used up! I had to format her computer's hard drive twice before I killed the virus and then reinstalled the Operating System (Windows 98 originally, but put windows 95 on in it's place). This has been your warning

Well, I hope this has given you some kind of insight to the vast world of the information superhighway. See you next month!