The Netcenter's

Surfing the World Wide Web via a Search Page

Everyone talks about surfing the Net. Surfing means poking about to see what interesting web sites you can find. You can surf or browse the web in two ways:

Use a Search Engine, such as Yahoo and type in a few key words to see what comes up.
Click on a hyper link from within a web page to see where it takes you. Such as the Back and Forward Button on this page.

You can also go directly to a web page if you know its URL.

The Netcenter gives you several search engines to search by linking directly to Search.COMThis is the best place to search anything because there are dozens of different search engines you can choose and each one has strengths and weaknesses in finding information depending on what you're looking for. Therefore, this is the most comprehensive search place on the Internet.

These search engines regularly scan all the text of all (yes, all) documents on the Web and keep up to date indices of the subjects discussed in the web sites. Yahoo is rather like a Table of Contents of a book - it organizes information by subject matter

You give a few key words and the search engine will locate all the web pages containing those words, often refered to as hits. In some cases, this list of hits will be much too long to be really helpful. In those cases, you must then narrow your search - be more specific about what you're looking for. Learning to choose the words and phrases you wish to search on is a matter of practice and see the results, then do it again.

Just click on the most promising hits to load the web page.

Sometime loading a page will seem to take a very long time. Occasionally, a particular web site is not available to your computer. Perhaps too many people are trying to connect to the page at once. Sometimes it is a problem with your phone line and/or modem which is operating slowly. Just surf to a different site and try again later. If this problem persists, contact your provider.