Course Learning

The world wide web is a big place. If you know the web address, or URL of a site you can find it by typing it into the address bar along the top of your web browser.

But what if you don't know the URL?

You can find pages by following links from other pages but usually it is easier to search for things using a search engine.

These are programs that search an index of the world wide web for keywords and display the results in order.

It's useful to think about the words that you use in your search.

Too few and you will get too many results, too many and you may get no results at all.

When you want to find the answer to a question - such as what countries did the Vikings raid? - you need to think about the important keywords.

You could just type the whole sentence into the search engine, but it will probably ignore some joining words and punctuation. Instead it might save time to search for keywords like 'countries', 'vikings' and 'raid'.

The search engine will provide us a list of webpages where we are likely to find what we're looking for.

Search engines use an algorithm to decide the order of their results. The algorithm works out which webpages should be most relevant for your search and ranks these top.

Search engines also provide images, videos or shopping results which match your search keywords too.

Ad stands for advert.

If you see 'ad' in your results, it means a business or organisation has paid for their webpage to appear in your search results.

This is one of the ways search engines make money.

The search engine will have ordered the results according to which websites the algorithm thinks are the most relevant.

You can click on the links to visit the webpages which should contain the information you are looking for.

However, it is good to follow a variety of links to check the accuracy of information you are looking for and remember the first links might be adverts!

You should always check if you can use the images in search engine results as these may be owned by other people.

Search engines often allow you to filter the results to only include images you are able to download and use.

Some search engines have settings to stop content that might upset you from appearing in the search results.

You can speak to a trusted adult about setting this up, to help keep you safe when searching the web.