Searching for information on the Internet

The Internet has millions of pages, and their addresses cannot be memorised. So search systems are used: web services that find pages on a topic. Widely used systems today are Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex and national search systems. They are opened through a browser: by typing the address or using the browser’s search box. Keywords – the most important words of the query – are typed in the search box. If you type “informatics” the results are very many and mixed; if you type the more exact “binary number system grade 7” the needed page is found faster. When an exact phrase is needed, in most systems you can put it in quotation marks; results can also be narrowed by sections such as “Images” and “News”. In the results list every item has a title, an address and a short description; the top item is not necessarily the best, and some are marked as ads. Test what you find: who is the source (organisation, author), what is the date, do other reliable sources say the same? Compare at least two or three sources. Do not copy other people’s text; write in your own words and name the source. Never type personal data such as your full name, address or passwords into a query.