The growing popularity of the Internet has given students of American government access to information resources that used to be readily available only to experts. As a result, learning to work the Net in order to find that information is a critical part of your education. We have included this section, Net Work, at the end of each chapter to guide you in your use of this incredible resource.

The best way for you to learn about the vast resources that are available on the Internet is to engage in your own explorations. Our purpose in the Net Work section is to give you some guidance to help you launch those explorations. That guidance takes several forms. In each chapter we highlight some of the more significant web sites relevant to the topics covered in that chapter. We also pose some questions and offer a challenging exercise that can help you to see what the Internet has to offer.

For instances, do you want to learn more about how the federal government is responding to terrorist threats? You can start by visiting the White House web site (www.whitehouse.gov) and selecting links dealing with the war on terrorism and homeland security. But you might also want to find alternatives to that site; if so, you can turn to one of the many fine search engines that are provided for free on the Internet.

Search engines are online services that are capable of finding information on those parts of the Internet that they are programmed to scan. Some search engines cover as much of the Internet as they can (universal engines), while others are more specialized. Perhaps the most popular and effective search engine is Google (www.google.com/). Among the oldest and most established universal search engines is Alta Vista, found at www.altavista.com/.

Other popular search engines are Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com/), Looksmart (www.looksmart.com/), Excite (www.excite.com/), Lycos (www.lycos.com/), and Northern Light (www.northernlight.com/). Universal search engines are also provided by some of the most popular Internet service providers (ISPs), such as America Online (http://search.aol.com/) and MSN (http://search.msn.com/).

There are also a number of more specialized search engines that cover a range of topics or serve specific communities (e.g., children). To find out more about these search engines, visit SearchAbility at www.searchability.com/. One that should prove especially helpful is FirstGov (www.firstgov.gov), a site designed and operated for the federal government that is citizen-oriented and user-friendly. Political Information.com (www.politicalinformation.com/) offers a search engine that focuses on more than 5,000 political and policy-relevant web sites. Those with more general interests can explore the Net through the Social Science Information Gateway search engine (http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk).

Take some of these search engines for a spin. See if you can find the reality behind some of Americans' most vulnerable political myths on the Internet. What is the real story behind the Washington cherry tree myth? What about all those stories we were told about young Abe Lincoln? While one must always be cautious about giving too much weight to information drawn from the Web, you are likely to find some interesting history sites using one of the better search engines. For an example, see Plimoth-on-Web at www.plimoth.org.

Do you want to know more about the role of government in the U.S. economy? See A Historical Perspective on the American Economy at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/ECO/1991/chap3.htm.