Domain and The URL

 

Do you just want government information? Are you looking for Australian sources on a topic? Do you suspect that educational institutions are most likely to have the answers? You can restrict your search to just these sources by selecting parts of the Web address or its url (Uniform Resource Locator).

Quick recap about URL

Every page on the Web has an address, called the URL (for uniform resource locator). For example: this course is http://library.stmc.bc.ca/domainstructure.htm. Let's look at the parts.

  • TLD: .ca: The top level domain (tld), in this case the country code for Canada.

  • Domain Name: stmc.bc.ca: This is the domain name of St. Thomas More.

  • Sub Domain: Library is a sub-directory in the STMC domain.

  • URL: library.stmc.bc.ca/domainstructure.htm: This shows the full path right down to the specific file (domainstructure.htm).

See Picture - Anatomy of a URL

Domains to Know: Here are some examples:

Generic Top-Level Domains

Countries

.com

Commercial

.ca

Canada

.gov

US Government

.uk

Britain

.org

Non-profit (usually)

.au

Australia

.edu

US educational institution

.jp

Japan

.net

Network (often commercial)

.fr

France

.biz

Business - ecommerce

.us

United States - mainly used by individual States. Recently opened to others.

.info

Information related

.eu

European Union - approved March 2005.

See Reference in the sidebar for complete lists of country codes and generic top-level domains.

Several new generic top-level domains have been coming into use since early 2002. Biz (for business / ecommerce) and info (anyone but tends to be related to inforamtion) are fairly well established. Less so are name (individuals), aero (aerospace), coop (cooperatives), and museum. Approved but not used much is pro for lawyers, doctors, accountants. In 2005, ICANN approved jobs and travel.

The most controversial domain has been .xxx for adult content. ICANN was close to approving this in August 2005 but, at the request of the U.S. Commerce Department, has put it on hold.

  

Reference

Generic top-level domains are described at this ICANN page.

Country domain name endings are available from IANA - WHois.

Reading

The Top-Level Domain Game by Greg Notess. (Jan 2002) Online Magazine -- reviews the new TLDs but can't predict implications for web searching.
(www.infotoday.com/
online/ jan02/
OnTheNet.htm)

 

Triple-X: a brief history of a dirty domain, By Molly Wood, ZDNet (Aug 19, 2005)

Internet is borderless

A company may have more than one domain. As an example, the Royal Bank of Canada has a domain name of royalbank.com ( http://www.royalbank.com/) and also royalbank.ca (http://www.royalbank.ca/).

It is net-savvy for companies to reserve both domain-name endings. In this case, the Web site is hosted in Canada, but that need not be the case. Many Canadian operations have their Web sites as .com physically hosted outside the country.

 

Next: We can use control words to search on the domain and url, or forms. Methods are reviewed in Domain Search.

Our Domain name is the address of our server: click here to see what your IP (Internet Protocol) address is.

Or, try this Google definition

define:TCP