Unknown Address

In this lesson, we'll see how you might use your knowledge of how URLs are constructed to locate a particular website (even when you don't know the actual address).

Let's say that you wanted to visit the University of Central Florida website (but you were uncertain as to the exact URL) what would you do?

This is where our "educated guessing" comes in to play: We know that UCF is an educational institution, so that tells us right away that probably the "domain" (or the last three letters of the address) is edu (for education). Most large company or organization websites begin with the WWW (for World Wide Web), so the URL might be www.universityofcentralflorida.edu

Clicking "Enter" we are told that

"Netscape is unable to find the server www.universityofcentralflorida.edu.
The server does not have a DNS entry. Check the server name in the location and try again."

Clicking "OK" we can try again.

We know that universities are often identified by their initials (UCF), so let's try www.ucf.edu.

Clicking "Enter," we see that our educated guess was accurate on the second attempt.

Let's try another university with the same strategy.

We'll look for the University of South Florida by using the address www.usf.edu.

Clicking "Enter," we see that this strategy worked again!

This is a good time, however, to point out the importance of being certain of the last three letters in the web address (.edu, .com, .gov, .mil, etc).

Sometimes, if you change only the last three letters to a different domain type (from .edu to .com, for instance) you might be amazed at the results.

From our previous example, let's change www.usf.edu to www.usf.com. What happens?

We find "Universal Studios Florida" (USF) instead of University of South Florida.

Many disreputable companies use this little feature to make money. These companies sometimes purchase the rights to web addresses which are similar to
legitimate organizations but with a different set of three letters (usually .com instead of .gov, .mil, or .edu organizations).

The site found at this "alternate" address is usually promoting advertising or some sort of "offensive material." (A similar strategy employed by disreputable businesses is to purchase the rights to web addresses which are common misspellings of popular web sites.)

Please be very careful when typing in web addresses or you might run across content that you'd really rather not see.

In this lesson, we've seen how a knowledge of how web adresses are constructed (and a little common sense) can help you find the site you're looking for even when you don't the exact URL.

For more information on searching for web sites or web resources, please see the "Online Searching Basics" tutorial on this CD-ROM.

See you next time!