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WEBSITE ADDRESSES/URLS
Go to a Specific Web Address

Going to a Specific Web Address

Every day, you are probably bombarded with web addresses. Web addresses are also called URLs,
which stands for Universal/Uniform Resource Locator. On the radio, on television commercials, in
the newspaper and magazines: “Visit us online at www.businessname.com!” Almost every business
and organization has a website now. You can recognize websites because they will almost all start
with “www” or “http” and end with “.com” “.org” “.edu” or “.gov” (these endings are called
“extensions”).
Recently, new specialized extensions were made available such as “.bike” and “.technology” and
“.photography”.

Here is an example of a typical web address: www.google.com

You would type this into your address bar to access Google’s website.
Let’s take a look at the anatomy of a web address:
Extension
Stands for World Wide Web
http://www.nytimes.com/world Specific part of the site

Name of site

Now that you know what a web site address looks like, you can go to a specific site by typing it in the
browser's address bar, which is located just below the toolbar. Other popular websites include
www.amazon.com, www.wikipedia.org, and www.youtube.com.

Here’s another look at the address bar:

To go to a specific website, you’ll need to:

1. Left-click once inside the white part of the address bar. This will highlight the address
already in the bar. You can also click and drag your mouse from left to right to highlight the text.
2. Press Delete or Backspace to empty the address bar.
3. Type the new address into the address bar (e.g. www.wikipedia.org).
4. Press Enter on the keyboard.

Voilà! The website should then appear on your screen:

 10
Following Links on a Web Page

A link (also called a hyperlink) is an underlined word or phrase or an image on a web page that links to
either another place on the same page, or to an entirely different web page.
You can tell that you are on a link when you slide the mouse over text or an image and your mouse
pointer becomes a hand with a pointing finger.

Go ahead and type a topic into the search box on the Wikipedia site (for example, search for “North
Carolina”), and then press Enter on your keyboard.

Run your mouse over the Wikipedia page that comes up. You'll notice that as you hover your mouse over
any of the blue words, the words become underlined, your mouse arrow changes to a pointing hand, and
(if you allow it to hover for a few seconds) a small description will appear below the link. This should also
happen if you hover over any of the images on the page.

Let's follow a link! Try clicking one of the blue words that appears on the Wikipedia page that you
are looking at—your instructor can assist you if you need help.

Here is how to do it:

1.Slide the mouse down to a word that is blue, or an image that causes your mouse pointer to turn
into a hand.

2. When the pointer turns into a hand, click once with the left mouse button.

You should now see a new page with text and other links. You can go back to the previous page by
clicking on the “Back” button on the browser’s toolbar.

Practice going to different links! Remember that you can use the “Back” button to go back to the
previous page or use the “Forward” button to return to the page you were looking at before you
clicked “Back.”
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USING SEARCH ENGINES

Finding Information with a Search Engine

To find information on the web, you will need to use a search engine. A search engine goes out and
finds information for you on the World Wide Web. There are many search engines out available to
use.

Google is currently the most popular search engine, but there are many others, such as
Yahoo.com, Bing.com, and Ask.com. Today, we’ll practice using Google.

Type the web address www.google.com into the address bar at the top of your screen. Then hit Enter
on your keyboard.

This should bring up the Google homepage on your

screen. A blinking cursor will appear in the text box to let
you know you can start typing something.

Type a word or a phrase that describes the information

that you are looking for (the fewer words, the better—no
need to use complete sentences!).

For example, type the word “beach” into your search box
to see what Google finds.

Refining Your Search

Try the following steps to narrow down your search:

 If you get too many "hits" (listed websites), try adding extra words that describe what you
want— if that gives more instead of fewer results, put “and” between each word. For example,
“beach and vacation” will find only pages where both of those words are included.
 Put phrases in quotation marks, e.g. “North Carolina governors,” “Al Pacino,” or “Orange
County Main Library.” This will find only those pages that contain these exact phrases.
 12

Understanding Error Messages

Sometimes you will type a website address but an error page comes up instead of the website. This
happens from time to time. The most common cause for this is that you have typed the web address
incorrectly. You can also sometimes get an error message when you click on a link on a web page.
This often means that either the link is “broken,” or the page no longer exists. An error page can
mean a variety of things, including any of the following:

 The website is temporarily down

 The website does not exist anymore
 The link you clicked is broken (it was created incorrectly)
 Your browser can’t open the site because of some restrictions
 Too many people are trying to access the site at once

There may be nothing you can do to rectify the situation. In this case, you might just have to move on
and go to another website or choose another link. In this day and age, major websites usually never
stay down for a long period of time. It is the equivalent of a major television network going down—
many, many people are working very hard to bring it back up as soon as possible!
Internet Vocabulary

http – Hypertext Transfer Protocol: is the set of rules for transferring files --
such as text, images, sound, video and other multimedia files -- over the
web. As soon as a user opens their web browser, they are indirectly using
HTTP.

https – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure: is a combination of the

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the Secure Socket Layer
(SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. TLS is an authentication and
security protocol widely implemented in browsers and Web servers.
https uses TLS (SSL) to encrypt normal http requests and responses, and to
digitally sign those requests and responses. As a result, https is far more
secure than http.

html – Hypertext Markup Language: is the most basic building block of the
Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other
technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's
appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).