Safer Internet Adventures:
  Parents and children often use the Internet as a learning tool. While web sites often have interesting information, colorful pictures, sound effects, and even videos, kids may stumble onto inappropriate sites. What can you do to keep your child safe?
  Start with a kid-friendly search engine: These are electronic "indexes" designed to ignore adult-only Web sites.
  When your youngster types in a topic of interest, the search engine will deliver a list of related Web sites. All your junior surfer has to do is click and go!

Note: None of the search engines are completely foolproof. Adult supervision is still the best protection.

• Many search sites build their catalogs using software programs, that are called crawlers, spiders, robots, or worms. These programs seek new Web sites and catalog them, usually by saving their text, or downloading their Home pages.
• Search sites differ in how they sort and catalog Web sites and in how they allow you to search their databases. The three most common types of search sites are search engines, search directories, and multi-threaded search engines. 

• SEARCH ENGINES sort Web sites by key text and allows you to search the database by keywords. When you enter a keyword's in the search form, the search engine looks for sites in its database containing the keyword's and then displays a list of matches. Search engines usually yield the most comprehensive list of results. However, you often have to wade through numerous sites that may contain your keyword but are not relevant to your search topic.
       Major search engines include: AltaVista, HotBot, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos, Northern Light, Cyberhound, and Open Text. Each engine uses different search methods, which yield varying search results.
• DIRECTORIES sort Web sites by topic and arranges the topics into hierarchical menus that you can browse level by level. By clicking on a topic, a list of subtopics displays.
        Directory catalogs are generally organized by people who discard irrelevant Web sites, these sites that turn up are often more likely to be relevant than those you might find using a search engine. Yahoo!, LookSmart, Infohiway, and Magellan are the best example of an Internet search directory.