The manual contains a brief outline of the history of the creation and development of information resources of the Interenet . It examines the basic technologies of the Internet - the structure of the network, the concept of protocols, the domain name system, some methods of diagnosing the health of the network. Special sections of the manual are devoted to the introduction of HTML hypertext markup into the basics of the language, as well as the theory of information retrieval systems and information retrieval in the global network. The manual is used in the educational process at the Department of Information Systems in the Arts and Humanities of St. Petersburg State University