From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Perform a basic search using Bing

From the course: Working and Collaborating Online

Perform a basic search using Bing

“

- [Instructor] A big part of being connected to the internet is having access to the seemingly unlimited amounts of information out there. As you may know, the best way to find information you're looking for is to perform a search through a search engine. A search engine is an online resource that systematically catalogs the contents of the web so that when you perform a search, you can bring up webpages matching the words or terms you're looking for. There are many search engines out there, and you've probably heard of at least a few of them, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Searching is such an integral part of being on the web that all modern web browsers have web searching built in. For example, to perform a search, I could go to bing.com here in my Microsoft Edge browser, and I could type the term I'm searching for in the search field here. But Bing is also the default search engine in Edge, and almost all browsers allow you to set the default search engine you want to use. So for example, if I wanted to search for information about Yosemite National Park, I can type that right into the address bar, regardless of whether I'm on bing.com or not. Notice as I type, suggestions to complete my search term start appearing. If I see the one I want, I can just click it. Otherwise I could have kept typing and pressed enter to search. And now I'm looking at my search results on Bing. Each search result is a link that will take me to the page or website that Bing has found. To help me determine if the page includes the information I'm looking for, most of the results also have a few excerpts of text from those pages and some images. For example, here's the Wikipedia page for Yosemite National Park, which I might want to read to learn a little bit more about the history of the park. So clicking that link takes me to the website, and as you can see in the address bar, I'm now viewing Wikipedia. If this isn't what I was looking for, or if I just want to browse other pages Bing found, I can click the back button to go back to the previous page of results. Notice that in addition to web pages, there's plenty of information here too. I can click about and see a summary about the park, I can get directions from my current location to Yosemite, and I can visit the official website using the website button here. And as you saw when I scrolled down, we can find news and photos related to Yosemite. If I scroll back up, I'll find categories that allow me to narrow my search to just images of Yosemite or videos of Yosemite, as well as maps, news, and even shopping pages where I could find products related to Yosemite that I can purchase. Let's say I'm looking for photos right now. I'll click images. And just like that, I see the results. As I roll over each image, I see information about the source of the images. Many of these appear to be from articles about Yosemite. And clicking an image allows me to see it at a larger size, and I can click the arrows here to browse through my results this way. I'll click the X button here to see the smaller images again. Notice at the top of the image results, we see a row of suggestions that may help you narrow down the type of image you're searching for. So maybe instead of searching for general photos of Yosemite, I want to search for photos of winter in the park. And there we are. So this has been a quick look at how most modern search engines make it easier to find the information and other content you're looking for on the web.

Contents