at UNH:
Finding Things on the World Wide Web.

There are many search sites and search tools now available for finding things on the World Wide Web. One category of search tool is the index, which uses humans to select and categorize links to Internet Web pages. Another tool is the search engine, which uses software robots ("spiders") to automatically search and index the Web page contents for significantly large fractions of the Internet Web pages. To start out we recommend Google as a search engine. Learn how to use that and then try some of the others that exist. Important in this learning process is the help information at each search site. That explains exactly how to do a simple search, a complex search, and how to use special features.

For a starting point see our search engines page. When you've got some experience with search indexes and engines, you may want to look at some of the special sites for finding people, companies, words, and much more. Whatever you are searching for just remember that although the Internet is huge and contains surprising information, not everything you might want is going to be there, and even if it is, it still might not be indexed by a search tool.