Quick to pick up
easy to use
Knowing how to read URLs is a key investigative technique for finding:
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Reading URLS - Part 1
URLs or Uniform Resource Locators are the Internet addresses of information. Each document or file on the Internet has a unique address for its location.
Here is a dissected URL taken from our URL MicroModule:
Using URL information is particularly helpful in answering several important investigative questions:
1. Who authored or published this information?
The root site is often a clue to ownership.
- In the URL http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt, the name of the organization can be obtained by truncating the url to http://www.ietf.org/. Here IETF stands for The Internet Engineering Task Force, the name found at that truncated address. The home page indicates that the IETC is an organized activity of The Internet Society (ISOC), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1992. The org domain ending supports that claim (although these days anyone can purchase the org domain).
- To find out who owns the domain ietf.org, search whois.net/ or www.pir.prg/whois. For this example, enter ietf in the search box (and in whois.net select org from the drop-down menu). You get the administrator's name and organization's street address--both excellent clues for further investigation, if needed.
A tilde ( ~ ) in the URL indicates personal ownership which identifies the publisher.
- In the URL http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/rfc/2396/toc.html, the tilde (~) is an important indicator of personal ownership. By truncating back to http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ one finds a free information site authored by
Jukka “Yucca” Korpela. The root site http://www.cs.tut.fi/tos/ is a Finnish site on which J. Korpela has authority to place self-published information.
Part 2: Is this information from the live Internet or is it archived?
Part 3: What is the information called and does anyone else reference it? |
