The following text was designed to teach students how to read between the fine lines of a web address.  This is the type of information your students should be aware of to assist in determining the legitimacy of a web site before they get to analyzing the content.

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 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. 

For example, personal web pages are often housed on the computers of commercial internet service providers (ISPs).  Some commercial ISPs give free space to their subscribers or sell space for profit so that anyone can have their own web page. 

An example of this is:

http://members.tripod.com/rancid_7/rancid.html

 

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. 

Click Here for some possible endings used in the United States.

Mostly 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 information but it lives on a .edu site.

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