How To Find Information on the Internet - 1: Search Engines

If you’re reading this, then you probably know about the power of the internet, and how it is able to connect you to millions of sources of information about anything from aardvarks to zygotes. In theory, this should mean that nobody who has internet access needs to be ignorant. However, things are not so simple.


For one thing, many people aren’t fully aware of the full range of tools that can be used can be used to find out information from the internet. For another, these tools may return so many items of information that it is hard to know exactly which item is most relevant. Fortunately, it’s possible to become skilled at quickly getting to the information that you’re interested in.

The biggest (and most useful) kind of tool that is out there to help you find the information you’re interested in is the search engine. These are pages that you can use to search for other pages pages that have thecontent that you’re interested in. Popular search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Then there are group discussion websites which focus on specific topics. People who are interested in those topics participate in the discussions by contributing posts. There are thousands of such websites, so the chances are that there’s one dedicated to the subject that you are looking for information on.

I’m going to spend some time talking about each of these tools and how you can use them to improve your success in finding the information you are looking for.

I’ll start by talking about search engines. At their very simplest, most search engines have a box for you to type in what you’re looking for. So you if you are interested in knowing how to cook nigerian food, you might type in nigerian food in the box and hit the Enter key.. The search engine will then return to you a series of pages with links to pages that talk about nigerian food.