The web is very useful for getting information this way, but what if you don’t know the URL you need? That is why search engines were created. There are more than 10 billion web pages on the Internet, not all of them are catalogued in all search engines and when you search for something you will tend to get pages that have nothing to do with what you want. However there are some ways to improve your search results.

Go to a search engine. They all work much the same but if you don’t know of one go to http://www.google.com/. In the text box you can type keywords (words that have something to do with what you want to find). Some search engines have more advanced features that you can explore on your own, but all of them support Boolean operators. The two most useful for web searches are AND and OR. It is best to type them in all caps. AND tells the search engine that the things on both sides must be in the web page (they may be in its text or in its META tags). OR tells the search engine that one or the other must be in the web page. So typing ‘boats AND models’ will look for all pages containing both words, whereas ‘boats OR models’ will find any page with either word. You can also use NOT, ‘boats NOT Titanic’ returns everything containing ‘boats’ that does not contain ‘Titanic’

You can do more complicated strings too, like ‘boats AND models OR ships AND kits’ which finds all pages containing both ‘boats’ and ‘models’ or both ‘ships’ and ‘kits’. You can also do something like this, ‘boats OR ships AND models OR kits’ which finds anything containing the word ‘boats’ or ‘ships’ along with either ‘models’ or ‘kits’.