There are simple ways to find the information you need on the Internet. You probably have your favorite home page set up on your computer. This is the first page that comes up when you access the Internet. Some of the most popular home pages include Aol.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com, and Google.com. Each of these have a search engine incorporated into their front page and will conduct a search when you type in the terms you want to search for.

Consequently, there are also some very elaborate ways to search for information on the Internet. If you are a professional researcher, you may want to use these more elaborate methods. However, for general purposes, it doesn't have to be a complicated process.

Say, for example, you need to find a nursing home for your mom. You want to find one in or near your home in San Diego. Using Google.com, you would type in the words “nursing homes” and you would get a little over 3 million websites listed to search through. If you type in “nursing homes San Diego,” you'll get back about 450,000. If you make the search just a little more specific and type “nursing homes in San Diego,” you'll get 280,000.

Following the link, which is in blue lettering, there will be a short description of the website to help you decide if it's worth your time to view the page. Click on the blue link and it will bring up that website. Click your back button and you'll return to your search results.

Another example would be to search for information about Alzheimer's. For just the one word, “Alzheimer's,” you'll get about 3,460,000 results. But say you want to know about medications for Alzheimer's and you don't want to sift through all of these sites. Type in “medications for Alzheim-er's” and you'll get 1,430,000 results. The most relevant sites will be listed first, with their descriptions under the link. Want to narrow the search to the newest medications? Type in “newest medications for Alzheimer's” and you'll have 229,000 results.

If you are coming up with a lot of results that don't meet your criteria, try putting the search terms into quotation marks. This makes the search more specific, but sometimes this can make your search too specific and you won't get any responses. Experiment and try reversing your terms or use a thesaurus to improve your terms.

If you want to know what something is, you can type in “What is ____?” If you don't get an answer, try a different search engine. They all use slightly different processes to find and catalog information.