Search The Web

How do I visit a web site? Where can I find information? What exactly is the web, anyways? If you're new to the Internet, you probably have a lot of questions on what you're getting into. That's exactly why we've created this page: to give you the basic knowledge needed to get the most out of what's quickly becoming the most powerful tool ever.

The first thing that we have to distinguish here is what the web is not. The web is not the internet. The web is a way that computers pass information back and forth to each other using the internet. Although it's the most commonly used aspect of the net, it's not the net itself.

So what is it exactly? There's no easy answer for that one, as it's constantly evolving. At this point, the web is a rich variety of text, animation, sound, links and pictures all bundled up into a neat package. When you load a web page, your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator etc. See question 2.) receives information using a computer language (protocol) called Hyper-text Transfer Protocol. When you receive a web address, it will almost exclusively start with http://, which basically tells your browser that it's looking for information using the HTTP protocol.

Okay, now we know the technical side. But what good is that to us? Well, basically it means that we don't have to worry about transferring files and manually entering in addresses, all the jumping from page to page and loading of sounds and pictures is done for us through the web browser. Which leads us to the next question....

A web browser is what you have loaded right now to view this page. It's a piece of software that reads the information coming from the net, and converts it to something viewable by humans. There are a few different browsers available at the current time, but the two most popular by far are Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. Each has features the other lacks, but for the most part, they both do the same thing. Unless you know what you're not getting from your current browser, there's no real reason to switch. A lot of the debating these days over which is better is purely personal opinion.

There are two ways to do this. The first, and probably the most common way you'll find yourself using, is to click on a link. What is a link? Notice the words Internet Explorer and Navigator are highlighted and underlined. Move your mouse cursor over either, and you'll notice it turns into a little hand with the index finger pointing towards the words. This specifies that the word is a link, and that you may click on it to load up the target, which is the page that it points to. Think of a link as the 5th button on your TV's remote control. Click the button, and it will switch tochannel 5, the channel the button points to.

The other way you can get around on the web is manually entering in an address in your address bar. Where do you find that? When your browser loads, there should be a bar on the top of your screen that has either Address or Location to the left, where you can enter in text. The image below shows the address bar if you're using Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. Any browser should have something relatively similar.

Move the mouse cursor over the bar, click on the address, and you should be able to type in an address. With most browsers, you usually won't need to enter in the http:// prefix, as the browser will automatically assume that you will be using the HTTP protocol. (We should point out that in most cases, you won't even need to type in the www either, but not always)

Where do you find an address? Pretty much anywhere these days. TV commercials now feature them, you can find them in newspapers, magazines, radio... they're popping up everywhere as the world becomes more "wired." The best place to go to find the address of a page you don't know is a search engine, which we'll cover in question 4.

Search engines. A search engine is a free service offering huge databases of information and addresses to the public. You may search for information by topic, browsing through the engine's directories, or you may enter in a keyword or phrase that the engine will use to search it's data, and pull out every page with that word/phrase in it. The following is a list of links to popular search engines that are just a click away. This is by no means a complete list, as there are hundreds available.

So I've tried the search engine, but I got hundreds of thousands of pages matching my keyword... which one should I choose? There's no real rule about how to go about doing this, unfortunately.

With some search engines, addresses are listed by percentage. The percentage means that the engine is xx% sure that this address will contain information that you're looking for. Of course, if you only specify one word, there will be millions of pages that are 90-100% matches. The more precise you are in your search keywords, the closer the information is going to match.

Other search engines will offer short descriptions of the pages next to them that might give you a better idea of what will be on that page. These are often helpful, but sometimes they can be misleading. Don't find yourself discouraged if you have to visit 5 or 10 sites before you find exactly what you're looking for. Usually it doesn't take that many tries, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared for the worst.