At the end of today's lecture, we looked at the use of major search engines such as http://www.excite.com/, http://www.lycos.com/, or http://www.yahoo.com/. There are plenty more. Just click on "Search" in your Web browser and you can select among multiple search engines.
First of all, each search engine has a different underlying data base. You should experiment with some of these search engines and determine which provides you with best search results in most cases. If you suspect that some information is available on the Web, but you cannot find anything appropriate with one search engine, you should definitively try another search engine.
Even though the information that is maintained under each search engine is different, they usually are all operated in the same way:
On top of these pages you usually have a box where you can type in the keywords you are looking for. You can type in a single keyword, multiple keywords separated by a blanc, e.g., kw1 kw2 kw3 (in this case, the search engine will look for kw1 or kw2 or kw3), and multiple keywords with a leading +, e.g., +kw1 +kw2 +kw3 (in this case, the search engine will look for kw1 and kw2 and kw3). If you try "text" where text appears in double quotes and may be a longer sentence, you should find pages that contain these words in exactly the same order (but eventually with a few other words inbetween).
Some search engines tell you how many hits they found that match your query, some search engines do not provide you with this information.