Yahoo, of course, is not the only search engine, so you should expect different results from other search engines. Although the last search strategy--the phrase "Sojourner rover" produced paydirt--the fact is that you would have to spend a lot of time to search every single site. When you get such a large number of hits, you have two choices: scan the list for what looks useful or refine your search strategy. You will learn how to refine your search strategy in a later lesson.

So how do you get a search engine to perform a search? When you enter any of the search engine sites that you bookmarked in the last lesson, you will usually see a blank white field waiting for you type in your search terms. This example is from Yahoo. All you have to do is click your cursor in the field and type either a key word (such as Mars) or a phrase (such as "Sojourner rover").

Important: Please pay special attention to the phrase "Sojourner rover"--it is in quotation marks. You should get in the habit of using quotation marks around your search phrases in order to get the best results.

It is also important to pay attention to what you get back from the search engine. For example, in Yahoo, the first information will be major categories that you can click on and browse through lists of sites. Categories can be helpful because they tend to lump lots of similar web sites together. After the categories you will find a list of individual sites that you can retrieve if any look interesting just by clicking on the link.