What is the Internet

The Internet is literally a web of interconnecting computer files that can be created and stored on computers throughout the world.  While there is lots of really good information available on the Internet, there is also a lot of junk.   This page will help you learn how to determine what is good and what is not. Below we will go over the parts of a web address (URL) and how knowing about them can help you determine which sites are best to use when doing research at CSU Long Beach.

The first thing you need to know about the internet are the parts of the URL (the URL is the address where a particular web site lives.  There are different parts of a site:

http://www.csulb.edu/library

Lets take the first part of the URL:

http://www.csulb.edu/library

This is the abbreviation for hypertext transfer protocol.  It is the standard beginning of all web addresses and will not help you determine anything about a site.

http://www.csulb.edu/library

The "www" is the abbreviation for world wide web.  Back when the Internet first started, every site included a "www" at the beginning.  Now that there are so many web sites on the Internet, www is not always part of a url.

http://www.csulb.edu/library

This tells you which computer the web site lives on.  In this case the computer that houses this site is California State University Long Beach (csulb). This is a big clue as to which kind of site you are looking at. 

http://www.csulb.edu/library

This is the most important part of the URL.  It indicates the Domain of the web site you are viewing.  This will tell you what kind of site you are looking at.  Each ending means something different.  Here are some possible endings used in the United States.

	.edu	.edu is always affiliated with Universities, Colleges and Educational sites. Keep in mind that many Universities give their students free space to create websites so they are not always created by scholars or cover scholarly topics
	.org	.org is usually indicates that a site is run by a non-profit organization like Public Broadcast System (PBS) or the Red Cross.  Although it is possible for ANYONE to buy an .org ending for their web site- even for profit companies! Keep in mind that organizations like the Ku Klux Klan are also   eligible to have .org ending in their URL
	.com	.com is the most popular kind of site because companies want to advertise their products to internet consumers. Keep in mind that some .com sites that provide medical or "scholarly" information may just be trying to sell you their product.
	.net	.net is the latest of new endings for URLs. It stands for Network.  Some of these sites are not for profit, but others are.
	.gov	.gov is exclusively used for sites owned and operated by the Government.  No one but the government is authorized to use this ending so it is pretty safe to trust the data and source for most information.

Outside of the United States, they use country abbreviations in the URL:

.uk (England)     .fr (France)    .ca  (Canada)

http://www.csulb.edu/library

A slash mark after the Domain name (.edu, .org) means you are going to a sub- section of the original web site.  This means that the more slashes you have the further away you get from the original site.   The same is true of the ~ sign.  So be aware that sometimes the further away you get from the root the less affiliated it becomes.

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~alison/psycho.html

This is a student page of a UCLA student.  It does not contain any educational  info but it lives on a .edu site.

For example: www.csulb.edu/you/are/getting/further/away from/the site/with/each/slash/line