Searching for Information on the Internet

Today, there are over one million Web sites on the World Wide Web. So how do you find the site you want? Search engines are special Web sites that allow you to enter keywords that describe the site you want and then display a list of links to sites which match your criteria.

Some search engines (like Yahoo) also organize sites into categories and subcategories through a process known as indexing. Instead of entering keywords to search for Web sites, you start with a category and drill your way down to find the subcategory that matches your search criteria.

When entering keywords in a search engine, try to be as specific as possible. Use combinations of keywords to narrow your search criteria, but be careful not to use common words that are not specific to the information you want to find.

The easiest way to construct a good search query is to first think of a sentence that describes what you want to know: "My family wants to visit the White House in Washington DC." Next, take out all of the extraneous information in the sentence. Your keywords are now, "family", "visit", "White House", and "Washington DC." If you had just entered in the keywords "White House," you still would have received information about the White House, but by using more keywords, the search will be tailored to your specifications. Including the words "my" and "wants" would only increase the number of results, without adding any value.