Starting Point : Search Engines

Brief Introduction

As previously mentioned, the Internet provides an immense resource of information in the form of websites.  There are millions of sites created by people all over the world who created the websites to share their knowledge and findings.  Most of these websites can be accessed for free, but there are also commercial, educational sites that require subscription. 

Search Engines as a gateway

To let of the world know of the webpages each web author had created, one of the most common way is to submit the URL (Universal Resource Location) to the search engines. The search engine in turn will list these sites to people who are searching for websites with these content.  The searcher searches for the information he or she wants by entering "keywords" into small boxes that allows you to type known as "search dialogue boxes".  For example, if you are looking for information on Chinese community, you can go to one of the search engines and enter the keywords as "Chinese Commmunity".  Explore with the keywords you use, like "Chinese", "Chinese heritage", "Chinese in Singapore" and so on.  Search engines often list different sites when the keywords changes.

Problems with Search Engines

Until this point in time, you might think that it is simple to look for whatever information you want by simply typing in the relevant keywords at the search engine websites.  However, one major flaw of search engines is that they often lists sites that are not related to the content you are looking for, and sorting the websites into useful and useless ones can be tedious some of the time.  Hence, it is always good to just use search engines as a starting point, and then explore the other related sites from the links found in the more useful websites.  Also, it is good to use a mixture of search engines, as they normally list different websites for the same set of keywords..