reading the internetIn order to analyze content you find on the internet, it's important to know how to read and understand web addresses. Just like home addresses, each website has an address. An address on the internet is called a URL (uniform resource locator) and when you type that into a browser it takes you to that location on the internet.
The base of a URL is the domain name. The domain name is made of two or three parts. The first part is created by the owner and is often how you refer to the website (ex: google, twitter, facebook). The second part is called the extension or the top level domain (ex: .com, .net, .edu). If a site is hosted in another country it may have a country code as the third part. See the table, at right, for more examples. |
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Sometimes there will be subdomains. An example is the address for this website (shown at left). The subdomain "shsresearchtech" indicates that it is a subdomain of the main weebly.com website.
After the domain, you may see forward slashes, which indicate sub-folders or sub-domains. If you think of a website as a book, you can think of these sub-folders as chapters within that book. You can also have subsections of sub-folders as you dive deeper into the website. A website could have thousands of folders.
There may be times you want to truncate a web address to find more information about the site or to explore different folders that aren't already linked to the page you're on. Truncating involves taking off or deleting small bits or large chunks at the end of the address. An example of that would be if you took off the "databases" part of the above website, you could find what is in the "learning" folder of the KCLS website. Understanding how to read a web address can help with validation of information you find - but doesn't always tell you the full story.