In a few seconds, the program will respond with a list of files that match the search. Depending on how specific the key words are, the search might find no files or thousands of files. The biggest problem is that the material on the Internet has been prepared by millions of people with no uniform structure. The most recent and most powerful search engines index every word in the document - quite a task considering they may catalog 30 million documents. Searches are amazingly fast - generally less than 30 seconds.
All searches result in a list of document titles that can be selected to jump directly to the file.
There are numerous ways to get on the Net. It is estimated that half of the 15 million Internet users in the US connect through one of the commercial services such as CompuServe and America Online. They are also more expensive for anyone using more than about 15 hours a month. Fortunately, the commercial services are linked to the Internet for e-mail transmission so you can correspond with virtually anyone online. File transfer is a different matter.