Search engines work by searching through pages on the Internet building up an index of words which appear on these pages. When you enter a keyword into a search engine, it looks through its index to find that keyword and returns links to all the pages which contain that word.

Using a Search engines is the best way to find information on the World Wide web, but you can make your searching much more efficient if you use some easy techniques to narrow down the number of results which your search produces.

A simple search uses just one keyword

A complex search uses one or more keywords, and might use additional boolean terms like AND, NOT, OR etc to narrow down the search.

Some search engines offer specialised searches on News, Images or Discussion groups.

Work through the following tutorials to improve your web searching skills: