I know it’s in here somewhere … with millions of web sites on the Internet, and more being added each day, finding what you want, quickly and painlessly, could be difficult. But don’t worry. You can use a search engine.

Search engines are special sites which send little programs called "spiders" to visit every web site on the Internet.

When you submit a search on a search site, the search engine will travel at high speed through its indexes to find the word or phrase you are looking for.

There are two distinct types of search engines on the Internet:

1. Internet search engines that search the whole Internet – these are like looking up an atlas or world map to find a particular place.
2. Local search engines on web sites like this one that only search within that web site. (Note: Not every site has its own search engine but most of the large ones do.) These are like looking up a local map to find a particular street or building within a town.

There are even search engines that will just search within a particular country – like looking in a map of Australia.

Many search engine sites also function as "portals", that is as well as giving you the ability to enter a search of the wider Internet, they also provide a directory of recommended sites listed under particular topics or interest areas (such as music or kids). As well as the search engines listed below, other useful portal sites include the Microsoft Network www.msn.com and About.com www.about.com. If you aren’t sure what you’re looking for, a portal site can be a really good starting point for your Internet travels!

• AltaVista
• Infoseek
• Excite
• GoEureka
• Hotbot
• Yahoo (really a portal site rather than a search engine – see above)

(These words are coloured and underlined, which means they are links to the actual search engine sites on the Internet. Why not come back to this page later and pay a visit to each one - then click the "back" button on your browser toolbar to return to the tutorial.)

All the above search engines operate in a similar way. You just type in your search term (key word or phrase) in the search box provided. When you click on the Search button the search engine searches every page of every web site that it has indexed for your word(s). You might think that this would take forever but actually you will get your results back quite quickly.

The results of the search (also called "hits") will appear as individual text links on separate pages and there may be a lot of them. Read through the results list to find the ones that seem to match what you were looking for. Often there will be more than one page of results and you will need to click on a link to go to the next page.

Local search engines
These only search for information on the site you are visiting. To find out how these (and Internet search engines) work, type the key word "cafe" into the blank space in this search box, then click the search button.