If you have a lot of time on your hands, and about 8 terabytes (8000 gigabytes) of hard drive space, you could download the entire World Wide Web. That's equivalent to all the books in the Harold Washington library. You'd probably be bored with the whole idea by the time you finished - assuming you were still alive. Fortunately, Brewster Kahle has already done the job for you.

Kahle was an early Internet developer, creator of Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), a system that preceded HTML (hypertext markup language) as a way of publishing and indexing Internet information. From a project to preserve Web pages for posterity -- the Internet Archive -- Kahle's company, Alexa Internet, developed a new kind of Internet tool that may not change the way we use the Web, but will at least add a powerful new dimension to it.

Named after the lost library of Alexandria, Alexa is a browser add-on that runs separately, and consists of several components. Installing Alexa in Windows 95 or NT will place its toolbar in the tray at the bottom of your screen when Windows is booted. When you start your browser the toolbar shows the site name. Click it to get a variety of interesting information about the site, including the name and address of its registered owner, and the date on which it was registered. You can also "vote" on whether you like or dislike the site, and there's a note of how many other Alexa users voted one way or the other. This is useful if you have some question about the site's integrity, such as when you wish to purchase something from it.

Alexa also provides ratings on the site's popularity, citations of reviews if available, its typical loading speed, a "freshness" rating (how often it's updated), and how many links and pages it has. Alexa also tries to recommend other sites similar to the one you're viewing, by providing links to sites that were followed by other recent visitors.

Because Alexa Internet has downloaded (and occasionally updates its "snapshots" of) the entire Web, its archive icon can bring up the most recently archived version of many sites that have moved, or no longer exist. This can relieve the frequent frustration of encountering the dreaded "404" (page not found) error message. There is a handy link to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary and thesaurus.

Supported by small, non-intrusive ads that appear on its toolbar, Alexa's price is right: free. It's a fast 1.2mb download at www.alexa.com.

With Windows 95 be sure you have a version of the file Kernel32.dll dated later than Feb. 2, 1996. Use the Find command on your Start menu to locate it and check its date. An updated version can be downloaded from Alexa's site. Alexa works with Netscape or Internet Explorer versions 3 or later. It also works well with my new favorite browser, Opera (NNN Feb. 28).

Serious surfers won't browse without it.

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