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How to SearchYou're new to the Net and wondering how to find what you want. The Web is awash with big boxes and buttons that scream "search me," but what does it all mean and how do you get where you're going quickly and easily? Let's start by answering a simple set of questions. What is a search engine?Imagine a huge library with shelves and shelves of books. It's pretty intimidating and you don't know which stacks have the books you want. That's the Web. Now imagine that you have a librarian at your disposal and you can ask her to bring back information on whatever interests you. She's a search engine. You just have to give her the right instructions. Where do I go to search?There are several different types of search engine and literally millions of places to look for what you want. Before you choose which site to visit, you should ask yourself, "What am I looking for?" Among other things, you could be looking for:
Some sites search the entire Internet, but many sites have internal search engines that only look at their own pages. Usually when people use the term "search engine," they are referring to popular sites like AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Google or Excite. What's a good place to start? Google is my favorite because it's simple and straightforward. It's hard to go wrong. How do I search?
This is what the search box on the Google
home page looks like. It looks almost exactly the same as search boxes on
any other site. Just click on the box, type in a word or words you're looking
for and then click the Let's try searching for recipes. Just
type the word "recipes" into the box and click the
Near the top of the page, you'll see an
indicator which tells you how many results your query has generated. Each
page only displays a portion of the total number of results, in this case only 10
of 4,230,000 pages. You can click What's wrong with this picture? We got too many results, because our search term, "recipes", was too broad. We should've told the search engine what kind of recipes we were looking for. If only we had been more specific. If we search for "desert recipes" (without the quotes), we'll get only pages on deserts. If we search for "brownie recipes," we'll get an even narrower set of results. |
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button.
On other sites, the button may say Search, Submit or something else but the idea
is exactly the same.
button. You'll then be transported to a page filled with different pages about
recipes. One thing you'll notice is that you've gotten a lot of results.
at the bottom of the page to go to the next page of results. You can keep
clicking 
to sift through all 4,230,000
results if you want to, but I'm sure you'll get bored very quickly.