Summary

Search engines provide an efficient way to look for information on the World Wide Web. You enter a query consisting of the key words you are searching for, and the search engine responds with a number of "hits," or Web documents that meet the search criteria. Searching is, however, a trial and error process with no guar­antee for success.

Many different search engines are available, each of which uses a different database and different search algorithm. Each database stores information about its collection of Web documents (running into the millions) and consists of the document's URL (i.e., its Web address) and information (key words) about what is contained in each document. It is important, therefore, to try different engines with the same query, and further, to continually refine a query during the course of a search.

Any given query (request to a search engine) can return hundreds (even thousands) of documents, so it is essential to structure queries in such a way as to return only the most relevant hits. All queries are, in essence, combinations of the logical operations And, Or, and Not. In general, the more specific your query, the better.

Specialty search engines are also available and enable in-depth searches on a specific topic. Specialty engines can be found through a generalized Web search for a specific topic such as "airline reservations," which in turn leads to several databases with flight information. One can also click the Search button on the Internet toolbar to display a list of specialty engines.

Images can be downloaded from the Web and saved onto a local drive for subsequent inclusion in a document. The Insert Picture command inserts a graphic image into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation.

A copyright provides legal protection to a written or artistic work, giving the author exclusive rights to its use and reproduction. Anything on the Internet or World Wide Web should be considered copyrighted unless the document specifi­cally says it is in the public domain. The fair use exclusion, however, lets you use a portion of the work for educational, nonprofit purposes, provided you cite the original work in your footnotes and/or bibliography.