28. INTERNET SEARCH ENGINE

A search engine is a tool used on the World Wide Web to search for key words then will give you a list of websites related to the key words you have entered. There are several search engines available. Some of the most popular search engines are; Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Open up your internet browser. In the URL type www.google.com

This will bring you to the Google home page. The text box on the home page is where you want to enter your key words you would like to search for. Once you have typed your word or words you have two options you can press enter or click Google search or click the I'm feeling lucky button. The I'm feeling lucky button will take the first search result and bring you directly to that page. For example if you typed in white house it would take you to whitehouse.gov. Clicking on the Google search button will give you a list of results based on the words you typed into the search box.
From here you can click on any of the links provided or used the left had navigation options to narrow you search. The options on the left side of the internet browser will let you use the key words to search for just specific items such as images related to the key words. By selecting one of those options only the selected type of files will be displayed.
Google is just one of many search engine providers. Yahoo is another search engine that this tutorial will review. To change the default search engine in your internet browser click on the down arrow of the search engine icon in the upper right search box of your browser. This will provide a list of search engines for you to select to use as your default. When you make a selection the icon will change in the left side of the test box to indicate the search engine you are using. NOTE: This is an example in the FireFox Internet browser other browsers may look a little different please email me if you have questions. IE allows you to search in the URL bar.
Click Manage Search Engines option at the bottom of the menu. This will open the Manage Search Engine List window. In this window you can edit the options that are displayed in the search menu. Clicking on a search engine in the list will activate the buttons in the window. The first button is the Edit Keywords. Keywords associated with a search engine work like book marks. They provide short cuts to get to common searches. The move up and move down buttons will change the order the search engines are listed in the menu. Remove will remove a search engine from the list. The link that says Get more search engines will bring you to a website that will let you add search engines to the list. To save any changes made click OK or to discard the changes click Cancel to return to your browser.
Most search engines work in the same fashion as Google but I will give you a couple screen shots so you can see the differences and hopefully it will help you to pick your favorite. Type www.yahoo.com in your web browser.

This is an example of the Yahoo home page. To use the search engine type your key word or words in the top text box next to the Search button. This works the same as Google you can simply click the search button or select one of the links above the search text box to search for a specific type of link such as an image, video, etc.
Some search engines are geared to specific types of searches. For example the Wikipedia search engine only searches the Wikipedia site for the keywords entered. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia so the search information will be geared toward information you find in an encyclopedia. There are several types of these search engines you can find on line that will not search the entire web but a specific site.