If you do not know the Web address of a site, or you do not know which site will give you the information you want, you can activate a search by clicking the appropriate button on the Browser toolbar. The software that carries out the search is called a Search Engine.

There are several available such as:

AltaVista – www.altavista.co.uk
Ask Jeeves! – www.ask.co.uk
Excite – www.excite.co.uk
Google – www.google.co.uk
Infoseek – www.infoseek.co.uk
Yahoo – uk.yahoo.com

To start a search you enter a keyword or a question to give the engine an idea of what you want to find. The engine examines Web sites for the keywords that you have entered and returns the titles of sites that might be appropriate, usually with a short description attached.

You should then click on the most appropriate or ask it to search again. Most search engines allow you the choice of searching the whole Web or just UK sites. If you choose to search for Vikings across the whole Web you are likely to get responses about the Minnesota Vikings US Football team because the Web is still dominated by American sites.

But if you search the UK only you are more likely to get responses about the Viking people in Britain. Some search engines ask you which sort of Vikings you want.

You can also refine your search with extra words to narrow it down. For example, if you want to find out about tornadoes to support a Geography project you might decide to search the whole Web for sites around the world. If you just enter the word ‘tornadoes’, the first selections produced will probably include sites about the Tornado fighter aeroplane and perhaps companies with the word Tornado in their trading names. Refining the search by entering ‘tornado’ and ‘weather’ will produce more appropriate results.

When you find a particularly useful page that you might want to visit again, you can add it to your Bookmarks or Favourites List – an address book of Web site URLs. The next time you want to visit the site you can go to your Favourites list and click on the name of the site to open it, rather than having to type the address in again. Some browsers also have ‘smart’ facilities that remember the URLs of sites you have already visited predicting the address you might want once you have typed the first few letters.

Example 7a

A support teacher had recently been asked to work with a pupil diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome and wanted to find out more about the condition. She thought the Web might help and had the URL of the National Autistic Society (www.oneworld.org/autism_uk) so she entered that into the address line of her browser software and logged on.

She looked at the home page of the site and decided that ‘About Autistic Spectrum Disorders’ might be a good place to start, so she clicked on that. The page gave her some interesting information on Asperger’s syndrome, so she decided to save the URL of the page in her ‘Favourites’ list by clicking on the toolbar icon for adding to Favourites. Next time she wants to look at it she can open the Favourites list and click on its name to open it, rather than typing the address in. She then decided to try using the Search facility to find other resources on the Internet.

She clicked the Search icon on the toolbar and a dialogue box opened. She typed Asperger’s Syndrome into the Search For box and was presented with an initial list of 10 sites, each with a short description. She opened those she thought might be useful and added the most useful to her Favourites list.

Key skills and equipment

The key skills for the above example are:

• logging on
• typing in a URL
• using a search engine
• adding URLs to Favourites / Bookmarks

• a computer linked to the Internet
• browser software

Example 7b

A teacher in a special school wants to create a Web site so he checks on what other schools are doing.
“I went to a talk at the BETT exhibition about special schools making their own Web sites. This was something I wanted to do so I thought I might get some ideas. The presenter described a research project that had been carried out and then introduced teachers from two of the schools involved. They gave some very useful practical advice and although the pupils in their schools had different needs to the pupils I teach, their general advice was helpful. The presenter gave the URLs of two Web sites that we could explore to find out more information:

“ www.sed.kcl.ac.uk/special/makingweb.html is the home page of the project that the presenter was describing. From here I downloaded a copy of the report ‘Making the Web Special’ to read later. It is very easy to read and has given me lots of practical information.

“The link takes you to a list of special school sites with descriptions. There are nearly a hundred schools on the list and I did not have time to look at them all so I started by printing the list to take away and shortlist the ones that interested me. The name of each school is a hyperlink, so when I had made my shortlist all I had to do was click on it to get to the site. I added the most interesting ones to my list of favourites.”

Key skills and equipment

The key skills for the above example are:

• logging on
• typing in a URL
• finding resources
• using hyperlinks
• adding to Favourites/Bookmarks

The key equipment is:

• a computer linked to the Internet
• Web browser