Searching the Internet

The internet is a very big place - there are millions of websites containing information on pretty much anything you can think of.

Different types of websites:
Blog: like an online diary, although blogs can be set up to look more like a website (like this one!). Websites where you can set up your own blog include Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr. A lot of celebrities like to keep blogs, as well as "normal" people.
Commercial: a website set up by a company to advertise it's products.
Community / Forum: where people with a similar interest can get together online and talk to each other through a message board.
E-Commerce: a website where people are selling something, eBay and Amazon are both examples of e-commerce websites.
Personal: a website set up by someone who is not a company. Usually about something that person is interested in, or to tell other people about themselves.
Phishing site: a website which tries to con people into entering their details so they can use them
Social network: where you can add people and interact with them, Facebook and Twitter are both social networking sites
Search engine: where you can type in what you are looking for and it looks up all the websites which contain those words. If all of the websites in the whole word were taken down, and just Google Search was left up then if you typed something into it it would not be able to find anything.
Wiki: a collection of information about a subject, these websites can be changed by anyone and so the information on them cannot always be trusted. Wikipedia is the most famous wiki website.


How does a search engine work?
A search engine works by you typing into the search bar what you are looking for. The search engine then takes the words you typed in and trawls through all the websites online looking for the words.
If you typed in "blue cheese" then it would look for those words on every website. If you typed in "blue chesse" (a typo!) then it would look for websites which have those words on them - although modern search engines have got quite good at spotting typos and spelling mistakes and suggesting corrections for you.
If you type in 'I want to know how to make a cake' then the search engine will find websites with all of those words on it.

All a search engine is doing is looking for websites which have the words on them. A search engine is not made up of websites, there are no websites saved in a search engine - it is just telling you where they are.
It works a lot like when you search the address book on your phone or on Facebook - you type in someones name and it shows you all the people who have this name.

What search engines are there?
There are many different search engines, and they are all quite similar but not quite the same.
Google
Bing
Ask Jeeves
DuckDuckGo
Yahoo!

How to search the internet properly
As there are millions of websites on the internet you can sometimes not find exactly what you are looking for. Knowing how to use a search engine properly can save you time in the long run, as it will help you to know exactly what to type in to make sure you find the websites with the most useful information on them.

Key words: Only type in the words which are relevant, there is no point in typing in "I' - just think how many websites have the word 'I' on them! If you typed in 'I want to know how to make a cake' then the search engine will look for those words on a website in any order. There might be a blog where someone talks about eating a cake one day, and then talks about wanting to know how to make a go kart the next. That website would have all of the words you typed in on it, but it has nothing to do with what you were looking for.
Instead of typing in 'I want to know how to make a cake'- just type in the words which are the most useful - in this case 'make' and 'cake', however 'make' isn't really the right word to use, so 'cake' and 'reciepe' are better key words to use.

Quotes: As mentioned above search engines search for words in any order, quotes make the search engine look for your words in the order you typed them in. Quotes have to be the double speech marks "blue cheese" will find different results to 'blue cheese'.

OR AND NOT: They are words (the technical term for them in computer speak is "boolean expressions") that search engines recognise and can use to help you narrow down your search results.
To try and explain this the example search terms will be looking for websites with information about cats (and/or/not) dogs.
OR: Or will look for websites that have one word of the words as well as websites which have both words on them. "cats or dogs" will bring you websites which have just the word 'cats' on them, just the word 'dogs' on them, and websites whch have both words on them.
AND: And will look for websites which have both of the words on them, searching for 'cats and dogs' will only find you websites which have the words 'cats' and 'dogs' on them. Both words have to be on the website in order for it to be brought up in your search.
NOT: Not will look for one word but not the other, searching for 'cats not dogs' will find you websites which mention cats but do not mention dogs in any way. Another example would be if you were looking for activities to do whilst on holiday but you already knew about one place so didn't want to get a lot of websites about it - "activites in Florida NOT Disney Land".

Advanced search: This will help you to narrow your searches down even further, this website explains some of the different features of Google's Advanced Search, but of course there are more search engines than just Google!