The World Wide Web, the most visible aspect of the internet. As your here I assume
you are already pretty familiar with the WWW, but I would recommended you read the section on security and privacy
in addition to this as Search sites are the essential to navigating the web, I will devote a few words to them.
Search Sites
Whilst search sites come in differing kinds, directories, indexes and meta-search engines, they all function in the same way. You type
in search keywords or phrases and they generate a list of web sites which hopefully match your requirements.
The secret in getting the best out of search sites, is to understand how they process your input.
Keywords Most search sites expect you to enter keywords so if you entered Ferrari sports cars, the search engine
would try to match any instance of the word Ferrari but also any instances of the words
sports and cars. But making it a phrase would not be good
because you may miss instances of Ferrari without sports cars, so Ferrari is the keyword the word on its own you enter for the search
engine to look for you can use several Keywords at once,
Example: Ferrari Maranello 355
Phrases Most sites allow phrases.So if you were searching for a site relating to Kate Bush, if you just entered
Kate Bush the search engine would match any occurrences of Kate and any occurrences of Bush giving many irrelevant results
,but if you enclose the search phrase in "" marks thus "Kate Bush" the search engine will only match the whole phrase.
Prefixes +- Most sites allow you to alter the priority give to a keyword, For example if you need information on the Linux operating system,
but in particular the redhat distribution you could enter:
+Redhat Linux
If using the same example you
didn't want information relating to the slackware distribution you could enter:
+Redhat Linux -Slackware
Other methods on navigation.
Assuming someone has gone to the trouble of creating a web site, they want it to be found, for commercial and corporate sites
this is especially true, so many companies will try to register their company name as their domain name. So if you want to find
the Sony web site you don't need to visit a search site and type Sony, you can assume with some certainty it
will be at www.sony.com and you'd be right, guesswork can sometimes really save some time. Remember .COM is for company .ORG is
for organisation or non-profit sites .CO.UK .ORG.UK there British counterparts, .NET is for service providers, I'm sure you get the idea.
Once you've found a good site relating to the subject of your choice, it's always checking for a links section with links,(address); of
other relevant sites.