Information Literacy Skills > Search engines, directories & portals

Introduction

The World Wide Web (abbreviated to WWW or just web) holds an unimaginably large amount of information about any topic you can think of. There are billions of pages which can be viewed. When you want to look at information on the web, you use an application called a web browser. You are using it just now! It might be called Internet Explorer or Firefox and there are a number of other alternatives. However let's just call it the browser for short.

Clearly you need to have a way of choosing which of the ten billion pages you want to look at so that you can find the information you are searching for. The pages are grouped in the form of websites with unique addresses (URLs) and each website has usually a particular purpose.

If you wanted to use the web to find out which television programme was on BBC2 at 8 o'clock tonight, you would need to know the address of the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk), enter that address into the browser and then you would be able to find the answer to the question.

As the web grew in size a method had to be developed to find websites because it quickly became impossible to remember all the URLs you might need. The first technique was to create a list a bit like a telephone directory. This directory could be arranged in order of topic. Creating this was very time consuming even when only a small number of websites existed as it had to be done by people reviewing them. With further growth of the web and to speed up the categorising of websites, the search engine was developed.

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