There are a lot of search engines about, the most popular one is Google so its best to always start there. Another reason to start there is that when someone creates a website they have to register it with search engines and Google has the most sites registered to it. Google also owns some of the largest sites on the internet now such as YouTube and blogger (so do not worry if you have a blog on there, Google knows it’s there you don’t have to do anything)
I thought I would share a few facts on search engines then I will give some tips on how to use it effectively.
1. Search engines cannot search the whole internet, they only have access to less then 10%, one reason is because sites have to register with them to be found but also because a large part of the internet is behind a or is private so search engines cannot go there. If you wish to know more this site has some good information: http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/secondaryweb1/a/secondaryweb.htm
2. When you put your search term and click search what happens is that the search engine sends out data packages called spiders to crawl the network to find the information you are looking for. They then bring that information back and index it according to how relevant it is for your search. This site shows a good overview of what happens when you use Google to search the internet. Google: How search works
3 Different search engines can be useful depending on what you are searching for, for example Google scholar searches for journals and papers and is useful for researching, plus there are sites dedicated to just finding jobs in certain areas and fields etc. Also when you use a site, that has a search facility that only searches their site. So without realising it you are using probably using many other search engines as you look around the internet.
As Google is the best known and most used I will give a little advice on searching on there to get good results.
It actually does help to know a few things on using Google to help you find the site you need. When you begin a search be as specific as you can be and once you have the results look at what you have and refine your search accordingly. For example if you are looking for a chicken recipe put in the term: chicken recipes then if you need something for a dietary requirement put that in too. So chicken recipes could become gluten free chicken recipes, you might find that gets a lot of results so you may need to refine a little more. Depending on the results you get depends on how you refine maybe you get a lot of results from a specific country so could try to put in your country. Then your search term becomes gluten free chicken recipes UK. Maybe you find a nice ingredient in a recipe, pop that ingredient into your search term and search again. As you go along you will find you get more and more specific results to what you are looking for. Eventually you should get a list of sites that are more manageable to look at.
If there is something you do not want to come up in your searches then put a minus sign before it and Google will not return with pages with that word in.
Its best to keep your search term specific as Google doesn’t read words such as ‘and’ or ‘it’ in sentences. Nor does it read punctuation. However if you wish Google to search those terms you need to put quotation marks around them. But be aware it will search each word on its own so will come up with a huge amount of results that might not be relevant. If you wish Google to search the whole sentence as a whole, say a title for a book then you put quotation marks at the beginning or the end of the search term. This means you can be very specific about what you wish Google to search for. This page has some good and simple tips to get the best results. Google: Basic tips on searching
I hope these tips have been some help. Searching can be quite daunting if you have never done it before and next time I will go over some safety features on Google and other sites so we don’t get any sites that we don’t wish to see. Obviously as Christians we will come across things that we might not agree with or things that might be offensive as the world sees things very different to us. But the Lord understands and sees our hearts, He knows when we are searching for something that we shouldn’t be and if we have just come across something we didn’t want to find.
According to Google there are 60 trillion web pages on the internet and we know the Lord knows every single one of them, He knows who created it and what and who is looking at them, we cannot escape Him even here and He will protect us if we ask Him. The internet can be a great tool for us to glorify Him and learn about Him if used correctly and He will guide us on here like He does in all aspects of life. We must make sure what we look at is not damaging to our fellowship with Him or leads us to sin and the temptation can be very strong, but the word says if we resist the devil he will flee so take heart as you use the internet as the Lord knows your intentions and your weaknesses and He will help you.