The software I'm using, which allows me to be on the internet and
write this question, Internet Explorer, is referred to as a "browser."
 However, in most ways, it isn't browsing but is pointed to an exact
address that I must input.   This leads to the first part of my
question:  Is it really possible to RANDOMLY browse the internet?  If
so, how does one do it?   And the second part of my question, which
seems closely related:  What is a web "crawler" and how does it work? 
 Of course I have read that search engines, such as Google, use
crawlers to locate new web addresses.   How do they do that?

Hello seattle,

Thank you for your interesting question. The term 'browse' for the
internet really refers to clicking on text called a hypertext link.
This is usually a a bit of text in blue which is underlined. This is
the main way to 'move' about the pages of a website. If you check a
defintion of 'browse' the main emphasis is on it being a more
leisurely activity. see
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=browse for a good defintion.
It is usually best to browse from an human edited index like
http://dmoz.org to get a true feeling of browsing.

Yes it is possible to randomly browse the internet. You can try
http://www.pcisys.net/~tph/randsearch-form.html for a random search on
Google.

Another interesting random search is
http://www.davidchess.com/cgi-bin/WordURL.cgi

although this may be less reliable

How do web crawlers work? 

The basic principle is rather like an automated web browser except
that it views the page and stores that text/information in an index.
The difference between web crawlers is the way the information is
indexed and sorted. a web crawler essentially looks only at the HTML
file and then  seeks out a hyper text link.

So the link between web crawlers and randomly browsing is that the web
crawler automatically and quickly follows(browses) whatever links it
comes across on a web page.

A good description of how these work in some detail can be found at
http://www.howstuffworks.com/search-engine1.htm

I hope this helps. If you require any clarifiations please feel to
ask.

regards

rcd-ga

search strategy:

howstuffworks.com
how internet search engines work

google search terms:
random stuff

yahoo! index search
Randomized Things

Hello rcd!   Thank you for the fine job answering my question.

I would also like to surf the internet as one surfs the TV or cable
channels. One way to sort of surf is to put a single word such as nor,
carrot, but, was, too in a search engine. This typically finds
thousands of web sites mostly radom, which you can surf for hours. A
high percentage are incredibly uninteresting, but you do find an
occassional gem.   Neil

Also try http://www.stumbleupon.com/