Your Internet

The fact that you are reading this means that you are in the process of joining the Internet revolution. This now becomes your Internet because you are the person using it. To help you in using it this section will try to describe to you some of the different aspects of the Internet. By learning the language of the Internet you will begin to understand what it can do and how you can use it to your advantage.

This course of units will develop these initial ideas and help you use them effectively so that you to can become Smart Surfers. Lets give you an example - what do we mean by searching the Internet?

The Internet is a world wide collection of computers all linked together. A lot of these computers contain information which you can access but how do you do this? You use search engines. This unit will tell you about search engines and the next unit will help you to use them more effectively.

If you are worried about what your children are doing on the Internet this will help you find out about it yourself. It will help you understand whether you really need to worry.

The basics

How do you move around on the Internet? The program you will use is called a browser and it is likely to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Have a look at the picture below. It is a picture of the top bar of Internet Explorer and, as you can see, it is the tool that helps you do things.

Searching the Internet

To find things on the Internet we use things called search engines. These tools are constantly collecting information about the World Wide Web and which they then use to answer your query. For example using the search engine www.google.co.uk if you want to know something about bats (the flying type) you might type 'bats' into the search engine box and then click on the Search button...

...and you get 23 million results. It could take years to look at all of them. So what do you do? The first thing is to decide why you want to look for 'bats' and what sort of 'bat' are you looking for. Are you looking for a cricket or table tennis bat? No. You are looking for a flying bat. Flying therefore should be a keyword in your search. The result is 2 million results. Brilliant, but can we make it any smaller? What other keywords can you use? It depends on your question. Maybe you want to know about what they eat. The keywords could therefore be 'bat flying eat' and this results in 800 thousand results. We are beginning to get somewhere.

In a later unit this will be discussed in more detail. At this stage the important point is to decide on the keywords and these are:

It is also helpful to put the keywords of the question in parenthesis. For example "flying bats" "food they eat" and then you can look at the 11 results.

 

 

 

 

 

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