Ok, by now you've probably figured out why you're online. Good. Now you want to know how to find all that stuff I've been going on about. It's not as hard as you might think. When you first launch your browser [pretty cool, huh? you don't open it, like a regular program, you "launch it" - I love 'net slang] you will probably be taken to some company's homepage, like msn.com, or netscape.com or something. If that's where you want to go, then fine. If not, then there's a solution. Search engines. Some sites either have search engines incorporated into them, or are "portal" sites, which are more or less just search engines in coloured paper, like Alta Vista or Yahoo. A search engine is a program embedded into a web site shell, and it lets you search the near-infinite web for information.

My personal favourite search engine is http://ww.altavista.com. What you do, is type this address in the empty text field underneath the toolbar at the top of the browser, and press Enter [or Return, or whatever], and that will shuffle you off to the site.

Once you are there, you will be presented with a huge number of options. Do not be intimidated by all this nonsense. If you see a link that looks interesting, click on it. Don't worry about losing your place, because you can always go back to it either by clicking on your browser's Back button, or by re-typing the URL in the text field. So don't worry. You will never find yourself in a place you can't get out of.

If you don't find any of those links interesting, then I have a solution: don't follow them. Instead, use the search function. I mean, that's the primary purpose of the site anyway. Somwhere on the web page you should see an empty text field with the word "Search" or "Go!" or similar printed next to it. This is where you can start your search. Type whatever it is you want to search for in the text field. If you want to know about cars, then type in "cars". It's that simple. Almost.

Chances are, you don't want to know what a car is. You already know. You probably either want to know about a specific type of car, or genre [like classic roadsters, land yachts, whatever], or maybe you want to know where you can buy a jeep. So what you do, is you refine your search. You make it more specific, using some nifty little tricks.

First, make sure that you are specific. Search engines look for words individually, and in the order you type them. So, if you look for "cars", it's going to bring back every single page it can find with the word "cars" in the META tag [not all search engines work like this, but the results are more or less the same], which is a chunk of code included in a web page to make it easier to find. If you are looking for classic roadsters, don't type in "cars", or even "classic cars". Type in "classic roadsters". When I searched for "classic roadsters" on Alta Vista, the results were pretty good. It brought me back 488 pages, starting with the one that most instances of "classic roadsters" in it, right down to the one with the least. Don't worry, it only gives you 10-20 links on any given page, with a brief description of the site that it is linking to. What you do now, is scan the descriptions, and follow the links that look interesting to you. The links will take you to the site that the search engine was telling you about - these sites are not part of the search engine, and exist all on their own - you can go back to them whenever you want.