How to Read a URL

  • Nearly all Web addresses begin with http://. This is telling the computer you are looking for a hypertext document.

  • The next part of the address is called the Domain Name. Everything in the address after the first two slashes (//) and before the first single slash (/) is the Domain Name of the site. Domain Names are broken down into parts, separated by "dots." For example, www.cnu.edu/index.html tells the computer to look for:

    1. www = A World Wide Web server
    2. cnu = Christopher Newport University
    3. edu = An education site

  • Domain Names are commonly read, from left to right, the smallest unit to the largest unit. Some of the most common endings are:
    • .gov = Government site
    • .mil = Military site
    • .edu = Educational site
    • .org = Non-profit site
    • .net = Network
    • .com = Commercial site

  • Foreign sites may also have identifiers at the end such as:
    • .uk = United Kingdom
    • .jp = Japan
    • .de = Germany

  • Until recently, United States sites had no national identifier, but some of the newer sites now end in .us and some even carry a state identifier before the .us such as .va.

  • Everything after the first single slash in a URL (/) is either a directory path or an actual document name. For example: http://www.ancestry.com/ssdi/advanced.htm
    1. www.ancestry.com = Domain Name of a genealogy site called Ancestry Search
    2. /ssdi/ = Directory for the Social Security Death Index
    3. advanced.htm = Name of the actual hypertext markup language (.html) document that has the information