- the URL and domain (.com, .gov…)
- the About or Contact Us section
- the type of ads or sponsored links
- the links to other websites or resources
- the date the website was updated
Being able to properly decipher URLs is an important skill in doing research online. Let’s take a look at what makes up an address:
http:// http:// http:// www.vermont.gov www.vermont.gov www.vermont.gov /portal/agriculture/ /portal/agriculture/ /portal/agriculture/ weather.php weather.php weather.php
(Click on each part of the address for more information…)
Almost all addresses you see will begin with http://. This tells your Web browser how to download the page. HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is the set of rules describing how Web files are sent across the Internet.
You can generally ignore the http:// when typing in Web addresses.
The part of the URL between http:// and the first / includes the domain name. Reading from right to left:
.gov is the Top-Level Domain (TLD). This part of the address can tell you a lot about what kind of site you are looking at. Here are some of the most common ones you’ll see:- .edu – .edu domains are reserved for educational institutions in North America.
- .gov – .gov sites are restricted to official US state or federal governmental organizations .
- .com, .org, .net, .info – These domains can be purchased by anyone. Traditionally .com domains have been used for commercial sites and .org domains have been used for nonprofits, but this isn’t universally true.
- .uk, .cn, .us, .tv, .sa, etc. – These are all country-based TLDs. Domains ending in “.uk”, for example, are based in the United Kingdom. (Some countries allow outside organizations to use their domains, though, so these don’t always indicate where a site is based. The island nation Tuvalu makes money by allowing television-based companies to buy its “.tv” domains, for example.)
See here for a complete list of top-level domains.
vermont.gov is the part of the address that is registered to a particular organization (or person). In this case, vermont.gov indicates that this website is an official governmental site run by the state of Vermont.
.edu and .gov sites are restricted to educational and governmental organizations, so you can be relatively sure about who runs the site. Be careful with other domains, though (.com, .org, .net. .info, etc.). Since anyone can register any domains, sometimes people will use valid-sounding domain names for the purpose of misleading people.
If you want to check to see who has registered a domain name you can do so by doing a WHOIS search.
You can ignore the www – it’s a holdover from the how web servers used to be set up. (Many newer sites don’t use “www” at all.)
Parts of the URL between slashes (“/“) are subdirectories of the website. Subdirectories are often used to organize content. When you see more than one subdirectory separated by slashes they are nested – In this case, the page is contained in a /agriculture/ subdirectory which is inside the /portal/ subdirectory of the Vermont state.
Looking at the subdirectories in the URL can give you a good idea about the context of a page in the site as a whole. One good way to do this is by “truncating” the URL – seeing what happens if you remove the rest of the URL after each slash:
- http://www.vermont.gov/portal/ – This is the main public portal of the Vermont state website.
- http://www.vermont.gov/portal/agriculture/ – This is the “Agriculture & Environment” page of the Vermont state website.
Here, the subdirectories tell us that this page is part of the State of Vermont’s public portal and is probably related to agriculture or the environment.
The last part of the URL (after the last slash) is the name of the file. The file name will often tell you something about the page’s purpose or content. (Note that the file name won’t always be displayed in the URL, though.)
Here, weather.php is a page giving current weather conditions in Vermont.
