Searching
The Internet gives you access to hundreds of millions of web pages from all over the world. Finding specific web pages and information is easy if you have the web address, but what do you do when you want to start looking for information?
Search engines
To search for information you use one of the many search engines available.
You enter keywords in a special box and then start the search. A list of 'hits' that match your keywords is displayed. There may be just one or two hits, or several hundred thousand.
The choice and combination of keywords will affect the number of matches that are found.
There are several hundred search engines; some of the most well-known UK sites are listed here:
Search agents
There are also some search agents - these are sites that will automatically several search engines at once.
How to access search engines
There are several ways of accessing search engines:
Using keywords in a search
To find information about specific topics, you use keywords. You enter a single word, or a list of words in the box provided. The more specific the keywords you use, the better the list of matching links will be.
For example, if you were to enter the keyword 'football' you would literally get millions of hits. You would be presented with a list of web sites and web pages, shown 10 or 20 per page. The list of hits would probably not be very useful to you. However, if you were to enter the keywords 'football premiership england' the list of hits would be shorter and more precise.
In general, you should use lower case characters throughout. If you use upper case letters, the matches are often restricted to those occurrences that have the same case as your search word
Depending on what keywords you use, the list of matching sites may be short, or very long - just a few matches, or several million. Most people only ever look at the first few pages of matches. Some companies spend a lot of time and money trying to ensure that their web pages always turn up near the top of the list. If you have a web site, and it turns up 14th on page 87 of matches, you won't get noticed!
Remember that the Internet is changing every day. If you use the same keywords in the same search engine, you may get different results each time! Obviously you won't if two identical searches are done within minutes of each other, but over the days, weeks and months, the search results will change.
Using logical operators in a search
To improve your search results, you can use so-called logical operators, for example, and, or and not. Quotation marks can be used when searching for particular phrases.
The rules for using logical operators differ slightly for different search engines, but in the main these logical operators will work in a similar manner.
A few examples follow.
roses and black
roses + black
Searches for web pages containing both the words roses and black
roses or black
Searches for web pages containing either the word roses or the word black (or both)
roses not black
roses - black
Searches for web pages containing the word roses but not the word black
"black roses"
Searches for web pages containing the phrase "black roses", i.e. the two words together in succession
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