In this guide we will see the basic concepts of search engines, categories, terms and search results.

SEARCH ENGINES

It is often said that Internet is like a huge public library without a catalog. There are collections and search engines that are the efforts of many people and organizations to make the access to information on the internet easier. There are thousands of search engines on the WWW, many of them specialized to specific subjects and many general engines.

A Search Engine is a web site that we give a word or a phrase to, and we ask it to look for the word, and it finds sites on the internet that match what we've asked for. They generally give us several options we can use to specify or narrow down our search. These are the most powerful tools to find something online.

This is the window of a search engine called Infoseek. It shows us the main characteristics of a search engine.

Basically, they look for documents that have the exact words we asked for, and they show us our search results. These are presented in a list, placing the ones the search engine considers to match better at the beggining.

The list usually includes the name of the page, it's URL and maybe a description of it's contents or the first words of the document.

From the results list, we can activate a link to one of the pages in the list or change our search term if we are not interested in these results.

The following example shows the first three results obtained by InfoSeek (www.infoseek.com) when we requested 'Tango Gardel'. As you may see, these words are the same in different languages as it found sites in german/english, spanish and french.

One of the best known search engines is Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)

Yahoo! editors have catalogued thousands of web sites in what they call Categories (or subjects). From there they branch out like a hierarchic tree to all web pages indexed by Yahoo! Yahoo! is very useful when we are looking for general information on a subject. This is an example of Yahoo! categories (They are the first three results of the word 'porsche').
Yahoo! es muy útil si estamos buscando información general sobre un tema. Éste es un ejemplo de las categorías Yahoo! (Son los tres primeros resultados de la búsqueda de la palabra 'porsche').

Every part is a link and we can access that hierarchic level by clicking on the title.

Once we've settled the Search Query (word or phrase) to Yahoo! and we ask Yahoo! to look for it, it looks through the sites it can access and presents the Search results. First it shows us the links in it's categories and then the links to the web sites.

A search in Yahoo! can be started by browsing categories and then advancing by selecting the options we are given or by specifying a search query in the search box and clicking on Search.

Activity

1 - Enter the Yahoo! search engine

2 - Choose a subject you would like to know about.

3 - Make a list of the key words you want to use to search the Internet.

4 - Investigate some of the links in the categories list. Watch how the branches open out. Can you find any specific subject?

5 - When you get to a list of pages (the subdivisions within categorías are finished) enter the pages you are interested in.

6 - Try a search by using a search query

• Write a word in the search box.
  
  
• Click on the Search button.

7 - Examine your results

8 - When you get to a list of pages (the subdivisions within categorías are finished) enter the pages you are interested in.

Once we start a search and are in a Yahoo! category we can use the box to write a search query and limit the search within that category.

9 - Close the browser.