End of the Road: Part 2

In order to "search the internet like a pro", you need to know about the internet, search engines, web pages, certain tricks and phrases. First off, the internet! In 1969, the US military created ARPANET(Advanced Research Agency Network), the world's first operational network and the succeeder of the existing global internet. Also, the internet and WWW aren't the same; internet is the actual network of computers and WWW is web sites that you can access from the internet. Next up is search engines! Search engines send out "spiders", which then "crawl" through al the pages and looks at the info in them and bring that info back to the search engine to put in its index. Now a little bit on web pages. Some are freely available and searchable by search engines, but others aren't: records in library catalogs, content of article databases like JSTOR or LexisNexis, etc.

Next, you should probably know some search tricks. There's phrase searching, truncation, boolean operators, special search characters, and search limits. Phrase searching allows you to find two or more words together, you usually do this by enclosing the phrase in quotes. Truncation allows you to search for many different variations of a single word all at once, it is often done with with a question mark, but can be done with other characters. Boolean operators allows you to combine search terms in various ways to make your search more accurate, many search engines have a default Boolean operator. 

Finally, one more thing you should know in order to "search the internet like a pro" is, Special Search Characters. They vary between different search engines; for example, ~ is in Google search synonyms, + is for important words, and - is for excluding words. Well, that's all. I hope this helped you in becoming an expert at searching the internet.