Search engines perform searches of the Internet from criteria provided by users. The search terms provided by users may be:
One place to start searching the Internet is in your browser, just click the Search button in the toolbar. In IE this will open a panel on the left of the screen with some simple search options. If you enter 'http://search.msn.com' into the URL bar you will get the MS search page and a list of five search engines to choose from in the left hand panel. The Netscape home page, 'http://search.netscape.com', provides a similar range of search options.
There are broadly two types:
A number of sites feature both keyword searching and directories and the services offered may be a combination of those provided by other organisations.
Many searches of the Internet are performed by entering a single keyword and taking the first few references from the list provided. Queries based on a single keyword search are likely to produce lists with hundreds of thousands of page references, far too many to examine, and it may be that the page you want is buried somewhere deep inside these enormous lists. The issue for Internet searchers, therefore, is how to locate the few pages which may answer a query in exactly the way required and with exactly the right content. For searches of popular artists, recent films or items you want to buy a simple keyword search may produce exactly the pages you require without further effort or refinement, but searching for good academic material at the correct level of difficulty may prove far more tricky.
For effective searching you should learn to use a number of the major search engines and also some of the more specialised tools available. No one search tool can be said to be the best, though there may be some you trust more than others.
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