The UCLA link to free scholarship Web sites Tavia Evans hardly knew what the Internet was, let alone how to use it, until her junior year of high school.

But the honor student decided to try her luck online anyway as she searched for college cash, plugging in phrases such as "African-American scholarships" to see what would pop up. A year later, Evans had surfed her way to $22,000 worth of scholarships. Evans, now a junior at Northwestern University, is one of millions of students who have turned to the Internet as an easy way to find financial help for college. As high school graduates get hit with the reality of paying for college over the next few months, the companies that run free scholarship databases are bracing for a frenzy of activity. "It's just amazing and at times gut-wrenching how desperate kids and parents are for funds," said Larry Gerber, president of Scholarships.com LLC, a company that offers a free database of more than 600,000 scholarships.Sites such as Gerber's are fast replacing traditional bulletin boards or visits to a high school counselor. Students simply type in information about themselves, their families, their hobbies and their grades, and wait for a list of scholarships that match their profiles. Evans used FastWeb, one of the oldest and largest of the scholarship databases. The site matched the St.Louis native with national William Randolph Hearst and Coca-Cola scholarships; she applied and eventually won both. Most of the large, well-established databases are free. Revenues come either from advertisements on the sites or marketing links that allow students to "opt in" and receive information on everything from college loan rates to online textbook companies. Often, the free sites contain warnings about scholarship scams, or companies that promise to find students money - for a price.