Getting on the Net

1) When you switch on the computer, you are not yet on the net. You will see a screen full of little pictures called ICONS. To get on the net you need to double click something called a BROWSER. The most common are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. You may have to click it twice.

2) You are on the net when a welcome screen appears. You are now connected by phone to thousands of computers all over the world. Getting the information you need and nothing else is where it starts to get complicated.

3) Click the Search icon. Something called a search engine appears. This is a programme which searches SERVERS for information requested. Servers are computers which just store and hand out information. There are quite a few search engines, and the one which comes up will probably have icons which connect to others. In each case they search thousands of servers all over the world and the combinations are all different, so if the first one is no help, try another one.

4) You click in a plain white rectangle to put the cursor in there and then type your query. Whichever one you use, the most important thing is not to give it too much choice. You will get thousands of hits, too many to get through in a day. Most of them will seem totally irrelevant, but it found the word you gave it somewhere.

• To illustrate this the author did a search himself. The engine was LookSmart, but the same kinds of thing apply to all of them with minor variations. A search for Hitler gave 144,510 results. Imagine how long it would take to look through the list, even if you didn’t have a fit first.
• If you were concentrating on his early life you could add a plus sign followed by Braunau, his birthplace: Hitler +Braunau. You put a space between "Hitler" and the plus sign, but not between it and the next word. This is important. This will not necessarily restrict it to his childhood, as anything about him might mention Braunau in passing, but it got it down to 2050.
• Our searcher then noticed an item in a Scandinavian language. Choosing a word at random, he entered it with a minus sign. This only got it down to 2037, but it was a help. To get rid of German entries he added -von, the German for "of". This yielded 1038, which would still be a lot to look through, but you can often tell from the titles whether items are of any interest, or you can add as many pluses or minuses as you can think of. You may carelessly add one that gets you no hits at all, but put it down to experience.
• Another way of narrowing down your search is to use quotes. The engine will look for the entire phrase. For example a search for "Alois Hitler" (Hitler’s father) yielded only 57 hits the first time.
• The headings on your results will be in a different colour from the rest of the text and underlined. You click on these to bring up the whole document.
• Now here is the really great thing. Many documents will have different coloured bits in the body of the text. These are hyperlinks. By clicking on them you can get to documents which in turn may have hyperlinks of their own. This is when you start "surfing the web". Some pages do not have hyperlinks: these are called "gophers". You have to burrow back to the previous page to get out of them.
• Use the "Back" icon to return to the previous page and the "Go" icon to get a list of all the sites you have visited that session. The "history" box, which is a list of all the sites visited over a longer period of time, works differently in different browsers. You may need help to use it, but it is really useful. Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world!