With the tidal wave of information on the Web, learning how to surf is an important skill. You will jump to the home page of the site. Mouse click on any words on the page that are underlined and highlighted, like this. These words are hypertext links which jump you to other related information located on the page, on the site, or other sites. In most cases, you will start out surfing a particular site or topic and through numerous hypertext links find yourself somewhere completely unrelated but interesting.
Directories are sites that, like a gigantic phone book, provide a listing of the sites on the web.
Sites are typically categorized and you can search by descriptive keywords. Directories do not include all of the sites on the Web, but generally include all of the major sites and companies. Yahoo is a great directory. Search Engines read the entire text of all sites on the Web and creates an index based on the occurence of key words for each site. AltaVista and Infoseek are powerful search engines.