DOING A QUICK SEARCH ON THE WEB


You'll probably find the internet to be a bit confusing at 
first .The web has no road maps, and it's constantly 
changing. You'll run into a lot of dead ends, but you may 
well find several paths that all lead to your destination. 



One of the keys to finding things on the web is to 
understand how internet addresses work.when you know this, 
your searching becomes much easier.

Everything on the internet is identified by an address 
called a URL----a uniform Resource Locator. Some people 
call them "earls". Either way, URLs are your tickets to 
internet surfing, enabling your computer to locate the web 
pages you want to see.URLs take the following form:-------


Protocol://several_address/document_name 


This may look a little complicated, but it's really pretty 
simple. For example, the following URL locates the home 
page of IDG books worldwide:

http : // www.idgbooks.com/  in this case,http:// signifies 
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, which is the way web pages 
are transmitted. The next part of the URL, www.idgbooks, 
identifies the IDGBooks Worldwide Web server . as you might 
already know, the.com portion stands for "company" and 
identifies IDG as a commercial enterprise. The final part, 
the forward slash, simply says you want to load the default 
page.

Cross- Reference------- if you skin the trailing slash it's 
automatically assumed you want to load the default page on 
the server. If you skip the protocol indicator, most 
browsers will assume you mean http : // . to learn more 
about the ins-and-outs of URLs, see Appendix A, "what's 
this URLStuff?"

Caution ------- don't make the mistake of using the 
backslash in place of the forward slash in web addresses. 
Backslash may be more familiar on PCs, but because the 
internet uses UNIXnaming conventions, you must use the 
forward slash rather than the backslash in internet 
addresses.