The Bush School
Library & Instructional Technology Department

How to Read a Web Address

The Basics

• URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the ‘address’ of a website.
• http stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the set of rules used to access information on the web.
• www stands for World Wide Web, the set of documents residing on computer servers around the world which are made accessible by http.
  

Other Parts of a URL

• Domain Name identifies the owner of a website. For example, www.whitehouse.gov can be read as server.organization.type, in other words, web server at the White House, which is part of the US government. When a website is registered, it must use an established domain type. The most common ones are:

.com .edu .gov .org .net

In order to determine the owner of a site, you can go to register.com , enter the URL into its search engine and find out who is the sponsor of the website.

• ~ (tilde) identifies a personal page within a website. For example, http://www.psy.jhu.edu/~yantis/ is Steven Yantis’ page. He is a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences (psy) at the Johns Hopkins University (jhu.edu). HOWEVER, not all personal pages are indicated by a ~.
• / (forward slash) indicates a directory, followed by a file within the directory. For example, http://www.gfsd.org/inetintro/dissect.htm. The owner of this page is the Glens Falls (NY) School District. The directory is inetintro (internet introduction). The file within the directory is dissect.htm, a document about how to ‘dissect’ a URL.
• htm or html stands for Hypertext Markup Language, a language (computer code) used for writing web pages.
  

Other Information

• As with any other kind of information (book, magazine, radio program), it is essential to evaluate a website’s source, quality and usefulness to the information need (a website for a motel in Gettysburg, PA is probably not useful to a student doing research on the Civil War battle). Many website evaluation tools are available on the web, including the Bush Library Evaluation Checklist. General considerations include:
  • Authority—whose site is it? Is the author or sponsoring organization easily identified and/or contacted?
  • Content—can the information on this site be corroborated in another source? Does it ‘ring true?’ Does the author give references to other sources?
  • Timeliness—is the information up-to-date, is the site maintained?
  • General appearance—is the site free from spelling and/or grammatical errors? Is it well-designed, do graphics enhance or detract from the site’s purpose?
  • Are there annoying pop-up ads or links to commercial entities?
• Be aware that organizations pay to have their sites listed in the first ten shown in a search on common search engines such as Google.
• Besides the ‘visible web,’ what you see in the results from a general search engine query, there is something known as the ‘invisible web’ which is made up of the contents of specialized searchable databases and pages excluded by search engine companies for various reasons. You can find information on the invisible web by means of such directories as www.findarticles.com and www.magportal.com, which search periodicals not covered by regular search engines.

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