SEARCHING ON THE WEB
1) Type one of the following website addresses for search engines in the address box in your browser, then press the Enter key on your keyboard:
You may want to save some of these sites to your Favorites list, by clicking on Favorites,
then on Add to Favorites after you reach that site [for Internet Explorer].
Or, click on the Bookmarks button, then on Add Bookmark [for Netscape Navigator].
-Or- you can use the "Metasearch" sites, which automatically search many of the above search sites:
http://www.aj.com ("Ask Jeeves")
Alternatively, you can just click on the Search button at the top of the screen in the browser window.
2) Type in the text for what you are searching for, such as "genealogy", in the white box provided (without the quote marks).
3) Click on the Search or Find button on the screen next to the white box –or– press the Enter key.
4) Since you will probably receive a list of thousands of website addresses (for a search on "genealogy", for example), you should probably click back into the search box, and modify your search text (to something like, "genealogy software", for example). Click on the Search or Find button again –or– press the Enter key.
5) You can click on any text that is blue and underlined (this is called "hypertext") to go to that website.
6) The numbers that are next to the listings, such as "940", "94%", or "94", are indications of how "relevant" that site is to your search request. This usually means how many times your search text ("genealogy" in our example) shows up in similar searches on this search site.
7) If you want to return to the search site to click on another hypertext "link," click on the Back button at the top of the screen.
8) Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page instead of clicking on one of the first web site links you see at the top of the page, in case there is a better site listing lower down on that page.
9) Click on "Next" at the bottom of the page, if there is more than one page of listings. When you are on the next page, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Previous" to get back to the first page.
10) Many of the listings on the search site pages may have nothing to do with your search term(s) (they may have nothing to do with "genealogy", for example). You can ignore these site listings.
11) When you’ve finally found the site you are looking for, be sure to save the address to your Favorites or Bookmarks list –or– write the address down on a piece of paper.
12) The top four or five sites listed on the first page are usually, but not always, the best sites to go to. The web sites at the top of the list sometimes get there by paying the search service for the privilege, or by submitting their addresses many, many times to the search service. (You can pay someone to do this for you if you have a site you wish to publicize.)