The Internet: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. How to Search the Web

Ever walk into a used bookstore? You know, the kind that has thousands of books jammed ceiling-high? The book you want is probably in there some-where—but good luck finding it. The Web’s a little bit like that jumbled book-store—times a billion.

Enter the search engine. As mentioned back in Section 2.2, a search engine is a site that seeks out Web pages, using the words you type in as clues (like 1960 best actress Oscar or weather New Jersey).

This chapter takes a look at the Web’s major search engines and explains how searching the Web is more than just typing in a couple of terms into Google and sifting through the first few entries on the results page. Finding gold, after all, goes a lot quicker when you know where to mine it. This chapter saves you the trouble of panning through 10 acres of dirt looking for the good stuff.

You’ll also find tips on looking for information effectively, so you can find what you want and still have some time left over…to go read a book.

UP TO SPEED: How Search Engines Work

Most search engines learn what’s on the Web by sending out automated programs called spiders or crawlers (searching the Web, get it?) to scan the Internet for pages that have been created or changed since the spider’s last spin around the Web. When it finds fresh material, the spider program adds the page to its index, a huge catalog of all the sites it’s seen.

Search Basics

Using a search engine is pretty simple. For example, if you want to learn ...