Digital skills for adults - Course 2 - English

The most productive way to conduct a search on the internet is through a search engine. A web search engine is a software system designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SEROs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories.

There are several various search engines available and some of them may seem familiar to you. The top web search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and AOL.com. For the purpose of this course, we will be searching using the Google Chrome web browser, and search first with the Google search engine and then Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

The first step is to open a Chrome browser by clicking on the desktop icon or the icon on the computer desktop’s taskbar. Once the browser window is open, type www.google.com into the address bar on the top of the browser window and press the Enter (or Return) key on the keyboard.

The browser now displays the large Google search bar. As you begin to enter the phrase Paris hotels into the search bar, notice how the search bar moves to the top of the screen as the words are typed. This movement is normal; continue to type the phrase.

 1. As the words are typed, the search engine will display a dropdown list of suggested search options. At this point either continue typing the phrase or select the option of hotels in Paris. Selecting a suggestion option is done in two ways; either by using the mouse to click on the desired option or by using the down arrow key on the keyboard to select an option, then pushing the Enter (or Return) key.

Search results are displayed in a list with hyperlinks that lead to sites that match our search criteria.

Practical exercise: 

please try to retrieve a previously visited web page from my browser’s history. You will be asked about it during the assessment later at the end of this module.