Find what you need online using the Safari browser on your MacBook


The Internet's primary function is to help people store, locate, and share information, regardless of their physical location. The Internet is vast and contains literally billions of pages of information, so how do you locate something specific? You use a search engine, of course.

Search engines send out digital scouts called "spiders" that scour the Internet and index the content that is available on every page they visit. This information is stored on the search engine provider's servers and is provided to you when you enter a search term.

So, if you are looking for a cheesecake recipe, you would enter "cheesecake recipes" as your search term and the search engine would provide a list of all the pages its spiders have visited that contain those words, with the best matches or paid ads at the top of the page.

There are many search engines to choose from. Google is the most popular - so popular that the term "google" has been entered into the American lexicon as a verb to describe the act of conducting a search - but there are others to choose from as well. Yahoo.com, Bing.com, and Ask.com all offer similar search features, or you can use a site like Dogpile.com that aggregates search results from a number of different search engines.

The key to success when using search engines is to be specific. The more terms that you enter, the more likely it is that the results that are returned will be what you are looking for. For example, searching for "Golden Gate Bridge history" will return more results relating to the history of the bridge than a search for just "Golden Gate Bridge" or "San Francisco."

When a search engine performs a search for you, it looks for your keywords or search terms throughout all the pages, but doesn't necessarily look for them together. If you want a search engine to look for a specific phrase or word combination, put your terms in quotation marks.

A good example is when you are searching for a person's name. Searching for John Smith will bring up pages that contain both of those words, so you might find information on John Peterson and Bob Smith. If you search for "John Smith" using the quotation marks, you will only receive pages that contain the name John Smith.

Safari comes with a built-in Google search bar right at the top of your screen. Just type the search terms you want to find in the box and press enter. Your search results will be displayed in the web page below.

You might notice some links at the top of the Google search page, such as Web, Images, Videos, and more. To narrow your search results to just image files, either click Images and use the search box on that page or perform your search and then click the Images link. If you only want shopping results to appear, enter your search terms and click Shopping.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Brian Nitten at 11152010

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