Where to Go If You’re New to the Internet

For those of you who are new to the internet this whole online business thing might seem a little overwhelming. If you have never really surfed online, you might find yourself wondering how to find information on the things that interest you. Once you get the hang of things, you shouldn’t have any troubles at all. This article will explain the basics for you.

Search engines are the new to the internet surfer’s best friend. The most popular ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves. There are plenty of others, but as someone who is new to the internet, these will serve you just fine.

Since you are new to the internet, what a search engine does is take the important words that you type in and looks for the same words in millions of webpages around the world. It then throws back all those matching pages and they appear in front of you. This usually only takes a few seconds since all these pages and articles are already indexed. The most popular and most relevant (according to the main words) will appear at the top of the list.

For example, if you type in “craft supplies, wheat, felt, google eyes”, your first results on the search engine page will appear with all of these. Further down, or on the next page will come those that didn’t match all of the search terms. Perhaps they only had felt and craft supplies on the list. And so on and so forth until in the last pages you are looking at just one of any of the words that you entered, such as “eyes” or “craft”. For this reason, most people don’t bother looking further than those first two or three pages.

Once you have typed in the words or phrases that you are interested in and gotten back your results, you are ready to start looking at websites. This can get a bit confusing for those who are new to the internet. There is so much information crammed into a tiny space that it can be difficult to know what to look for. The first few results on the page, the ones that are separated by a colored box or a line, are sponsored links and they will generally lead you to a website that is trying to sell you something. Most new to the internet explorers fall for the appealing text of these ads, so stay away from them. Continue downwards until you find the real websites.

Each website has a title and a brief description. You can often tell from the few sentences that you can see whether or not this is something that you wish to look at. Many people who are new to the internet only read the titles and click, but these are not necessarily indicative of what there is on the page, so read the description, too. If the site is not what you thought, hit the back button at the top of your screen and try another site.

Just because you are new to the internet doesn’t mean you need to end up lost in cyberspace. Understanding how to use a search engine is the first step in getting to the sites you want to visit. After that, everything else is easy.