Digital skills for adults - Course 2 - English

Search engine: it is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites or information on the Internet. The most popular search engine is Google, but there are other search engines like Bing or Ecosia. There might also be some locally specific search engines in different countries. 

Internet browsers may have some differences based on the exact internet browser you are using, and the device used to navigate on the internet, but the basic parts of a browser are always the same. In this example, we are using the Google search engine in the Google Chrome browser. The main parts of the browser are marked with numbers. Below is the image, you will find the description of each part of the browser.

1.- Title of the webpage. In that section, you can see the title of the webpage you are on. If you have opened more than one page, this will help you to identify the page you are on or to navigate among pages. 

2.- Open a new page. It is possible to open more than one page at the same time; you can switch from one page to another by clicking on the title of each page. 

3 URL bar. In that section you can see the URL (the address) of the webpage you are on; and if you want to go to another page, you can type the address of the page you want to go to and the browser will take you to that page. 

On the image above you can find a description of the navigation

1. Arrow Buttons. These two arrows navigate the browser back (the left arrow) to a previously viewed webpage or forward (the right arrow) to more currently viewed webpages. These buttons can be pushed more than once to cause the browser to go back or forward further to web pages rendered in a browser session’s history.

2. Refresh Button. This button reloads a webpage. Refreshing will update the information on a webpage if it has changed. If a webpage has not completely loaded, refreshing will reload the page so that it completely renders on the screen.

3. Home button. This button links to your home page. By default, the home button does not show on most of the browsers,

 here are steps to show the home button on Chrome:

1. On your computer, open Chrome.

2. At the top right, click Menu and then Settings.

3. Under "Appearance," turn on the Show Home button.

Resizing and Closing Buttons. These buttons allow a user to change the size of a browser window.

1. Minimize Button. Represented by an underscore in the upper right corner of the window. When minimized, the browser will remain on the taskbar but not be visibly open on the desktop.

2. Maximize Button. Represented by a square in the upper right corner of the window. When maximized, a browser window will enlarge a window, typically filling the entire computer screen.

3 Close Browser Button. The button in the upper right corner which is an X will terminate a browser session. This button allows a user to quickly close a browser window when they are finished surfing the internet. Note: If there are multiple tab windows open a browser it will usually ask if you want to close all of the tabs before shutting down the browser.